


In London

by thingswithteeth



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Historical Accuracy, Historical Inaccuracy, I Don't Even Know, Jack the Ripper - Freeform, Living In Bygone Times Would Suck, M/M, Murder, Newspapers, Prostitution, Writing About Mutants Before The Discovery Of DNA Is Hard, Xavier Institute Sort Of If You Squint, Yes Really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-19
Updated: 2012-04-14
Packaged: 2017-11-02 04:53:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/365191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Autumn, 1888. Erik Lehnsherr has returned to London, the same city where his mother was murdered almost two decades ago. Charles Xavier has abandoned upper crust society in favor of doing charity work in one of the city’s poorest districts. As an unlikely friendship begins to form between two very different men, a mysterious killer stalks women through Whitechapel, his crimes destined to live on in posterity. Tensions mount with each new victim, until the city is ready to boil over – with far reaching consequences for Erik, Charles, and possibly the world at large.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JaeFire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaeFire/gifts).



_“In London there is an East End and a West End. In the West End are those fortunate ones who are sent into the world with a kiss. In the East End are the others. Here live the poor, the shamed, those whom Fate, seeing how shrunken and bent they are as they creep through the gates of life, spat in their face for good measure. In this East End a corner has been set aside where, not content with spittle, Fate sends the poor on their way with a blow, a kick, and their hats shoved over their eyes. In this spot, with the holy name Whitechapel... we would have to sink or swim, survive or go under, find bread, or if we could not, find death.”  
_ _  
_\-  Jacob Adler

 

 _Though the shark's teeth may be lethal,  
_ _Still you see them, white and red.  
_ _But you won't see Mackie's flick knife,  
_ _'Cause he slashed you, and you're dead.  
_ _  
_\-  “Mack the Knife,” Threepenny Opera  
 **  
**  
  
 _August 6_ th _, 1888_  
  
          “Lipski!”  
  
          Erik didn’t look up at the shout. He didn’t particularly want to encourage the three men standing by the end of the dock – and he could see them as well as he cared to out of the corner of his eye. He recognized them in passing, as many of the men who showed up every morning to wrest work from the foremen at the docks recognized each other, and from the doggerel they were currently spewing at him they recognized him; Erik did not look particularly Jewish. If anything, he was almost painfully German, although ‘foreigner’ was as bad as ‘Jew’ to most of the East End’s native sons.  
  
          “Ought to be ashamed,” jeered one of the three as Erik came closer. “Taking good work from hard-working Englishmen. Why don’t you go back where you came from, Russkie pig?”  
  
          Yes, he definitely recognized these three. They had shown up at the docks that morning too drunk to work, and with so many men both ready and willing to take on a day’s labor the foreman could afford to be picky. Since he sincerely doubted that any of them had every laid eyes on a map, he was willing to pass over the fact that they apparently couldn’t distinguish Russia from Germany. The entire world was probably a fat blob of ‘not England’ in their minds.  
  
          “Talking to you, Lipski!”  
  
          He was beginning to wish that the name of Israel Lipski had never become known. He wondered if any of them even remembered the identity of the young woman Lipski had killed over a year earlier. Erik certainly didn’t, and he had the added benefit of having been able to read the sensationalized account of her death the newspapers had printed. He thought he might have paid more attention had he known that her murderer’s name would become a synonym for the entirety of Whitechapel’s Jewish population.  
  
          Then again, maybe not.  
  
          They kept hollering at him as he walked past. Occasionally Erik would catch one of the other dock workers casting him a sympathetic glance – he wasn’t afraid to work, and among the men of the docks who valued _work_ that said more about him then who his people were and where he had come from – but none of them spoke. Erik didn’t really blame them. They were all as exhausted as he was, and eager to be home to their families or off to enjoy what little was left of the Bank Holiday. Besides, the men and women who lived in London’s East End were rarely foolish enough to borrow trouble not their own.  
  
          A rock struck Erik between the shoulder blades.  
  
          He stopped, rough indifference turning to low, simmering anger in the pit of his stomach. He was tired and sweaty from the day’s work, and the August air was thick and oppressively hot. His back ached, and neither the rock nor the knotted tension that had coiled through his muscles with that first use of Lipski’s name helped the matter any.  
  
          He rolled his shoulders to relieve some of the tension and considered his options. Not many of the men at the docks were willing to pick a fight with Erik, these days. Necessity kept his temper in check almost all of the time, but he was big and he was _mean_ when riled.  
  
          The baring of his teeth might have been called a smile, if the person naming it such was particularly unobservant or dull-witted, or had perhaps never seen a smile before. The not-smile faded abruptly a moment later, his expression turning abstracted as his attention was diverted from the men’s catcalling and the first stirrings of his own temper. In London, metal was a constant, from the big steamships that he helped to load and unload each day to the scant fistful of coins that he was paid at the end of the day, but he found himself now a little too aware of the bits and bobs of metal that the men were wearing: the nails in their boots, the small tin buttons running down the front of one man’s shirt, the pin in another’s hat, left there by mistake or some errant spouse. He _felt_ it, all those lovely fragments of metal practically vibrating in place with silent longing, waiting like an eager hounds waited for the word of their master. It would be easy, so easy, to let them do his fighting for him. Nails and pins could do a lot of damage to unprotected flesh.  
  
          And an angry mob could do a lot of damage to one man, even a man who could make metal dance and sing to the tune he played.  
  
          Erik let go of the nails and the buttons, and they settled back into place with nary a murmur of protest. The men didn’t even seem to notice that anything was amiss; it was possible they were still drunk. He ignored their laughter as he turned resolutely forward and continued on his way home.  
  
          The little side street that Erik called home was in a quieter part of Whitechapel, and was located in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood around Petticoat Lane. Here, the noise and bustle of London was dimmed if not dismissed entirely. The buildings were ramshackle and sad, but the cobbles were kept clean and mothers felt easy enough to let their children snatch a few scarce moments of play outside between work and dinner. Cooking smells both delicious and foul hung in the air along with the less pleasant smells of city life and the ever-constant reek of the Thames.  
  
          Erik had never much enjoy London and had enjoyed it even less since his return, but familiarity had a certain soothing quality nonetheless. The last of the tension eased out of his shoulders as he walked up the uneven steps to his building.  
  
          Once upon a time, it had been a house. Sometime in the last half century the never-large dwelling place had been split into six separate, tiny flats. Most of those one-room residences housed at least two families, although the flat on the first floor and to the left of the narrow entrance hall was home to a group of young factory workers who had no brothers or fathers to split the expense with.  
  
          Erik had claimed the room in the attic as his own. The solitude was worth the added expense, the cold winters and the broiling summers. He had no extra mouths to feed, and no family to send whatever could be spared from his wages home to. Some nights, like tonight, he regretted the long climb up rattling a creaking stairs to reach the upper stories – but overall, worth it.  
  
          There was a plate on the landing in front of his door.  
  
          He scooped it up and stared for a moment, blankly, at the tiny _knish_ sitting proudly at the center of the plate. Then he sighed. Mrs. Leibowitz downstairs was kind, and she worried that he didn’t eat enough. She didn’t really have the food to spare, not with four growing children of her own to feed, but she also hadn’t taken it well the first few times he had tried to return one of her offerings. He had long since learned that the easiest and most effective way to deal with her moments of generosity was to quietly slip her husband a coin when her attention was otherwise occupied, and leave it at that.  
  
          He took the plate inside and shut the door behind him.  
  
          The attic room was small and dark, and the ceilings were low enough that Erik had to stoop to fit. A rough little kitchen range had been cut into the chimney almost as an afterthought, and the one pan Erik owned sat on the bare wood beside it. A bumpy mattress stuffed with straw was shoved into a corner. Beside it was a small oil lamp, two books that he had scrimped and saved to purchase and one that had belonged to his mother, and the old cigar box he had found abandoned and repurposed to contain what few personal items he had: a thin stack of letters his father had written his mother in better times, and the silver _Vereinsthaler_ they had found near his mother’s body, laid out on the cobbles outside of a house not unlike this one and a long way away from the country that both coin and body had once called home.  
  
          One of the constables had laughed as he picked up the coin. “Payment for services rendered, eh?” He had laughed again, and a couple of the others had joined him, and even as a child Erik hadn’t been nearly dim or sheltered enough not the discern the man’s meaning.  
  
          The constable’s helmet had made a very satisfying noise as the metal beneath the blue felt had crumpled and caved in on itself.  
  
          The only other furniture the room boasted was a scarred wooden table and a three-legged stool, both more than a little wobbly. That was fine; it suited Erik’s needs very well, and there wasn’t exactly room for more furnishings. Already it looked a little cluttered. He sat on the stool, and proceeded to devour the _knish_ , potato and onion and carefully parsed out meat rich on the back of his tongue. It was still warm; Mrs. Leibowitz must have sent one of the children to leave it when she heard Erik come in.  
  
          Once he had finished he stepped downstairs to wash the plate under the street’s one communal pump, and found Alex Summers sitting on the stoop, his eyes narrowed and staring at something further down the street.  
  
          Alex lived in the flat on the bottom left, and was a product of the orphanages and the workhouses if ever Erik had seen one. Erik doubted he found his pay in the factories the way that the others did, but Erik knew better than to ask, and didn’t care enough to do so as long as Alex didn’t bring his troubles home. The boy didn’t seem to much like the young men he lived with, but he tolerated Erik the same way a particularly mean alley cat might, acknowledging him one predator to another but otherwise skirting warily around him. That suited Erik just fine.  
  
          So he wasn’t entirely sure why he paused at the bottom of the steps and tossed a tired query of, “Problem?” over his shoulder, except that if there was one Alex would likely be the first to know and Erik wanted to be the second.  
  
          The grunt that was Alex’s answer was hardly revealing, but Erik thought it was meant to be a negative. “Reformers,” he muttered, and jerked his chin in the same direction he had been staring. Erik followed the gesture with his eyes.  
  
          The source of Alex’s ire was man and a woman, standing and talking quietly to one of the locals outside of a house further up the street. Alex’s conclusion was a reasonable one; they were too well-dressed for this part of town, too well-groomed, and much too well-fed. The only people like that who came around here were the toffs looking for a good time – and the man wouldn’t have brought his wife along for that – and the people who wanted to _help_.  
  
          The man turned as if he felt their eyes on him, and when he met Erik’s gaze he smiled. Erik stared at him until he stopped.  
  
          Erik’s suspicions were confirmed, because no one smiled that way at a stranger in Whitechapel or Spitalfields unless he wanted something (usually money or sex, but sometimes more) or unless he was hopelessly naïve and bent on saving the pour lost souls of Outcast London. Possibly he just wanted to Save the poor lost souls; they got a lot of that, especially in this neighborhood, but unless getting Saved put food on the table and kept a roof over small heads, no one was interested.  
  
          He held the man’s eyes for a moment longer before turning away and walking over to the pump. “Tell them that we already donated to the Society For Giving Alms to the Poor To Avoid An Evil Death, and send them on their way.”  
  
          Alex snorted. “What if it’s not money they’re looking for?”  
  
          Erik finished rinsing the plate clean and turned to smile at Alex. He was aware that it wasn’t a very nice smile: too many teeth. “Then send them on their way twice as fast,” he said as he approached the front of the house again, “and tell _him_ that if he’s smart, he’ll get his pretty blond wife and his pocket watch out of here before nightfall. Not necessarily in that order.”  
 __  
That was enough to startle a laugh out of Alex. The young man coughed once, like he didn’t laugh often and the sound had dislodged something unpleasant in his throat. Erik didn’t stick around long enough to see if Alex had a response, or if the reformers did come to their stoop. He just returned Mrs. Leibowitz’ plate and retreated to the dubious comfort and definite solitude of his attic.  
  
          In the last dying light of sunset, he tugged a cigarette from the crumpled paper packet he kept in his pocket and read on his stool, tugged over to the window to take advantage of what was left of the daylight. Once it was too dark to read crawled out of his clothing and beneath his thin blanket. Lamp oil and candles were too expensive to waste, and it was better if he went down with the sun in any case. A smart man got to the docks early if he wanted to shove his way to the front of the crowds of would-be workers and claim a day’s pay.  
  
          Sometimes an early start wasn’t enough, however, and Erik returned home mid-afternoon in a foul temper, mentally tallying how long he could survive on the meager stockpile of pence sewn into his mattress. Fate and the foremen hadn’t been kind that day, and the job that should have been his had gone to another one of the droves of men who had gathered in the foggy predawn to beg work.  
  
          His temper wasn’t particularly improved by finding Mrs. Leibowitz waiting on the second floor landing. The door to her flat was open, and the heat and cooking smells pouring onto the landing through it were evidence enough of why she’d stepped out. Even early in the day, before the murky fog had completely burned off (and some days, it didn’t burn off at all) it was too warm in August to sit inside with the fire going. She had a newspaper clasped between her hands, and was frowning down at it with more concentration than the drivel they usually printed probably warranted.  
  
          She jumped when the step creaked beneath his foot, nearly dropping the newspaper as she pressed a hand against the front of her dress, over her heart. “Erik! You’ll scare the life out of me.”  
  
          He did his best to school the irritation from his face, because he probably was rather scary looking right then. He tried to smile instead.  
  
          Mrs. Leibowitz looked alarmed. Erik stopped smiling.  
  
          “Have you seen this?” she asked, obviously taking pity on him. She thrust the paper into his hands and he looked down at it reflexively.  
  
        “‘Petticoat-lane is one of those localities which the average respectable and decorous Londoner shuns with horror,’” he read dutifully. “We’re in the papers. How nice.” He went to hand the newspaper back to her, and she made a low, annoyed noise.  
  
        “After that.”  
  
        Erik scanned the page, trying without much patience to figure out what had gotten her into such a dither. His eye caught on a smaller news item midway down, neatly black-printed words leaping out at him:  
  


_MYSTERIOUS TRAGEDY IN WHITECHAPEL._

_A WOMAN BRUTALLY MURDERED._

_  
The Press Association says:–About ten minutes to five o'clock, this morning, John Reeves, who lives at 37, George-yard-buildings, Whitechapel, was coming downstairs to go to work when he discovered the body of a woman lying in a pool of blood on the first-floor landing. Reeves at once called in Constable 26 H, Barrett, who was on beat in the vicinity of George-yard, and Dr. Keeling of Brick-lane, was communicated with, and promptly arrived. He immediately made an examination of the woman, and pronounced life extinct, and gave it as his opinion that she had been brutally murdered, there being knife-wounds on her breast, stomach, and abdomen. The body, which was that of a woman apparently between 35 and 40 years of age, about 5ft. 3in. in height, complexion and hair dark, wore a dark-green skirt, a brown petticoat, a long black jacket, and a black bonnet. The woman is unknown to any of the occupants of the tenements on the landing on which the deceased was found, and no disturbance of any kind was heard during the night. The circumstances of the tragedy are, therefore, mysterious, and the body, which up to the time of writing had not been identified, has been removed to Whitechapel Mortuary, and Inspector Elliston, of the Commercial-street Police-station, has placed the case in the hands of Inspector Reid, of the Criminal Investigation Department, and that officer is now instituting inquiries. Up to one o'clock no clue of any kind had come to the knowledge of the Commercial-street police authorities._

_  
_ “We’ll all be murdered in our beds,” Mrs. Leibowitz muttered, so apparently he had stumbled upon the correct article.  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Erik said, more harshly than he had really intended. “These women are killed all the time. It doesn’t mean that the rest of us are in any danger.”  
 _  
_ Mrs. Leibowitz winced, and Erik remembered belatedly that although the oldest of the children she had living with her was her fourteen-year-old son, there was another child, an eldest daughter who she and her husband hadn’t heard from for years. His mouth twisted into the shape of an apology, but he couldn’t figure out what form the words should take, so he let it go.  
  
Instead he said, “Try not to worry. No one is going to murder you in your bed. I live right above you.”  
  
The tight press of her lips instantly softened. She went up on her toes and placed a kiss on his cheek, which he did his best to suffer with grace. “You’re a good boy, Erik Lehnsherr. Your mama must be a proud woman.” She stepped away, oblivious to the way that Erik’s face had gone cold and remote, and made a vague, shooing motion at him. “Get along with you, but come down for dinner tonight. We never see you, and you don’t eat enough.”  
  
“I eat just fine,” Erik demurred, and left before she could notice that he hadn’t accepted her offer.  
 _  
_ He realized only belatedly that Mrs. Leibowitz’s paper was still clutched in his fist. He cast it carelessly on the mattress as he entered his flat. There was nothing new or particularly interesting about another dead prostitute in the East End, no matter what his downstairs neighbor thought.  
 _  
_ Anyone in London could tell you that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, some kind of disclaimer might be necessary here. I've researched to the point of brain-feels-like-pain for this story, but that doesn't mean that there won't be mistakes, particularly in regards to geography. I have trouble navigating the town I live in, much less Victorian London. Maps only confuse me. There's no helping it. I've also failed to exclude a couple of cheerful anachronisms; for instance, I have sincere doubts that Erik would consider himself _German_ , being as the unification of the German states technically would have happened during his lifetime. As well as playing fast and loose with history, I intend to gleefully ignore pretty much all of X-Men canon outside of the XMFC movie and whatever bits and pieces suit my plot machinations. Because yeah, a story about how Erik and Charles find true love while hunting down Jack the Ripper is obviously _totally canon compliant_ otherwise. You've been warned.


	2. Chapter 2

_August 14_ _th_ _, 1888_

 _  
_“Darwin will be here shortly.”  
  
           “Hmm.”  
  
          “Charles? Are you even listening to me?”  
  
          “Mmm-hmm. Darwin. Here soon. Wishes escort us home due to misplaced concern that we’ll be _set upon_ by the most vile of _cutthroats_. Said concern patently ridiculous, being as said cutthroats could easily be convinced that they’re a flock of chickens.” Charles didn’t look up from the papers spread across his desk, even when Raven came to stand in front of him.  
  
           The desk had belonged to his stepfather. Charles had gotten a kind of perverse pleasure out of moving it from the house in Berkeley Square to the dark, narrow building he had rented two months ago in one of the worst parts of London. Kurt Marko would have been appalled, which was enough to bring a little tingle of pure glee to one of the less than kind corners of Charles’ heart.  
  
          “Is that what you did to those men who came by earlier?”  
  
          “Essentially.”  
  
          In actuality, all Charles had done to the group of young ruffians – one of the area’s numerous gangs – when they had appeared on the doorstep of the newly inaugurated Xavier Institute for the Health and Education of Needy Youngsters and began growling out vague promises of “protection” that were in actuality promises not to break any of his bones or set the Institute on fire so long as he paid them a ridiculously high stipend, was convince them that their new neighbor was far, far too dangerous to be trifled with. He had let them fill in the blank of _why_ he was so dangerous themselves; considering the upbringing that so many of these children got on the streets of Whitechapel, he was almost certain that their imaginations were more equal to the task of envisioning dark and terrible things than his was.  
  
          “Charles.”  
  
          “Yes?”  
  
          “Stop what you’re doing and pay attention to me.”  
  
          That made Charles smile, and it was enough that he made a show of shuffling the bank statements and accounts he was reading along with his worn copy of _Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn_ into a messy pile and placing the whole thing on the edge of his desk, just out of easy reach. He turned his full attention to Raven and took a moment to study her features, almost as familiar as his own.  
  
          He had known her ever since he had found her raiding the kitchen of his family’s house in town as a child. She had been wearing the shape of his mother, and once the misunderstanding had been cleared up and Charles had finished wallowing in the relief of finally, _finally_ finding someone as inexplicably different as he was, he had nearly laughed himself sick at the thought of his mother so much as setting foot below stairs, much less filling the chocolate pot with her own hands.

  
           They had been inseparable ever since, and so far as anyone knew (as a result of some careful tweaking of memories by a young Charles Xavier) he had never _not_ had a pretty, blond baby sister. Still, he had been surprised by how willingly she had pledged herself to this pet project of his, and it had reminded him of how little he knew about Raven’s life before she had come to him as a child. It was rare for him not to know something he _wanted_ to know, but as a boy he had impulsively promised to stay out of Raven’s mind, and Charles had always been reasonably scrupulous about keeping his promises.  
  
           “Yes?” he prompted. “You have my undivided attention. Do go on.”  
  
          Raven glared at him, but it was half-hearted at best. “Doctor McCoy and Moira are ready to leave as soon as Darwin arrives. Are you prepared to tear yourself away from your undoubtedly _fascinating_ paperwork, or should we prepare ourselves to wait on your pleasure? Again.”  
  
           Charles supposed that he had been a little preoccupied of late, and that perhaps he had kept the others waiting late into the evening once or twice recently – or forced poor Darwin to make another trip back into Whitechapel to pick him up once the others had gone. He just hadn’t quite anticipated how much time and energy it would take to start a charity in one of London’s most deprived neighborhoods, and sometimes he got so bogged down in the details and so consumed by the absolute necessity of what they were doing (all those hungry, wanting minds, every day and every night, deprivation that he hadn’t even been able to dream of as a child) that it was easy to lose track of time or to stay beyond the hours he had set for himself.  
  
          “Perhaps I’ll stay here tonight,” he said, his eyes wandering toward the pile of papers at the edge of his desk. “Either Hank or myself will be spending the night once we’ve opened our doors, in any case. Might as well get used to it now.”  
  
          Raven shrugged a shoulder, unconcerned. “Perhaps we should just sell the Mayfair house. Or let it out, at least. There isn’t much point in keeping it if we’re going to be here all the time anyway, and the money would help to fund the Institute.”  
  
          “Absolutely not,” Charles replied, and pasted on his best politely immovable expression.  
  
          He was responsible for Raven now, and he wasn’t going to allow his own interests to hurt his sister’s chances. Charity work was a perfectly acceptable occupation for a lady, but moving them from their fashionable residence in the West End to a house in one of the East End’s worst slums would be an unprecedented disaster, so far as Raven’s social standing was concerned. It was bad enough that her preoccupation with the Institute had led to her skipping the last few big events of the London Season, and would probably lead to her missing the entirety of the hunting season in the country as they tried to get things here in running order.  
  
          “Besides,” he added, “we’re not exactly hurting for money.”  
  
          His – their – mother had died almost a year earlier, right as he had been finishing his Doctor of Science at Oxford (and making him, officially, the youngest man in England to hold that honor). Their mother’s death had not been unanticipated and, once she had been respectfully buried and the period of mourning had passed, he had set a plan years in the making in motion. While Sharon Marko had been alive, it had been a matter of courtesy not to upset her overdeveloped sense of propriety by doing anything so untoward as devoting his life and the money and property that had become fully his with Marko’s passing some five years earlier to charity; with her passing, the last obstacle between Charles and what he wanted had been removed.  
  
          To Charles, it was a simple equation. He had money. The people of London’s East End needed the things that money could provide. Therefore, he should be the one to provide those things.  
  
          Raven shrugged again, as unbothered by his refusal as she had been by her own suggestion that they give up the Berkeley Square house. “You’re going to be the death of poor Darwin, with all this going back and forth. I hope you know that.”  
  
          Darwin – Armando Muñoz, properly – had been something of a revelation to Charles. Nothing had surprised or pleased him more than stepping into a growler cab one rainy afternoon and doing a surface skim of the driver’s thoughts, only to find that he had once again stumbled most fortuitously upon someone who shared his own _unique_ differences: Darwin had been in the process of keeping his skin at the same rough consistency of glass in order to keep off the wet chill, and _hope no one notices_ had been very much on his mind. Darwin had been Charles’ first real confirmation that extra-human abilities weren’t exclusively the purview of Britain’s upper classes; he had never really doubted, of course, but since prior to that there had only been Raven, and later Hank, it had been nice nonetheless to have his beliefs substantiated by proof.  
  
           Once he had found out all about what a particularly _intriguing_ extra-human ability Armando possessed, it had been inevitable that Charles would start referring to the other man by the name of his absolute favorite scientist. After all, Charles Darwin and his theories were representative not only of Armando’s abilities, but of what Charles Xavier believed of all of them. The things they could do weren’t magic but science, and the natural progression of human evolution.  
  
           Raven had once, in a fit of pique, suggested that Charles had mourned Charles Darwin, when the great man had died only six years earlier in 1882, more thoroughly than he had ever mourned his stepfather or even his mother. Which wasn’t quite fair, even if it was true.  
  
          She had then gone on to suggest that Charles’s love of science was such that he would have done some thoroughly _debauched_ things that _he hadn’t even known_ _his sister knew about_ to Charles Darwin, had he ever been given the opportunity. Which was neither true nor fair.  
  
          ...probably.  
  
          He _had_ possessed something of a reputation at Oxford, he supposed.  
  
           He, Raven, and Darwin, along with Moira MacTaggert and Doctor Henry McCoy, had built from Charles’ half-realized dreams what was now the Xavier Institute for the Health and Education of Needy Youngsters, and the realization that he and Raven were not alone had expanded the Institute’s mission from that which Charles had originally conceived, almost a decade earlier. Yes, the Xavier Institute would do its best to alleviate suffering in Whitechapel in whatever small measure it could. However, along with that undoubtedly noble ambition, they now aimed to find those of their own kind, to make sure that none of the extra-humans (because Charles had started out calling them _Homo Sapiens Superior_ , but the others, with the exception of Hank, had insisted the name was too unwieldy for daily use) would ever feel as alone as each of them had, at one point or another. Charles knew that he was lucky; he had come from a prosperous family, and he had met Raven young. Not all of the extra-humans could be as fortunate, and Charles and the others could offer them not only companionship but the help they needed, especially if they had been born amongst London’s neediest population.  
  
          Of them, Moira was the only one who deviated not at all from the normal parameters of human abilities. Charles had met her immediately after having the title of Doctor of Science conferred upon him, while he was in the process of getting well and truly intoxicated in celebration of his achievement. She had told him she had been in attendance for his presentation of the research that had earned him the title, and since Charles had always rather liked a bluestocking and she had the _prettiest_ auburn hair he had ever seen, he had invited her to join him.  
  
           She had asked him if he truly believed that humans had the potential to evolve beyond their current state of development and, unlike so many of the people who asked him that question, she hadn’t been either laughing or scandalized. For once, Charles had given the honest answer, rather than a vague, “well, it’s entirely theoretical, of course,” and he had been rewarded beyond his wildest dreams with the realization that she _believed_ him. He had possibly been aided in this realization by plucking memories of seeing people using abilities not dissimilar to his own out of her head, although Moira’s mind was curiously opaque, the way people who were particularly secretive or particularly private often were. Since Charles did his best to respect preferences of those who truly valued and craved that privacy, he hadn’t gone digging any further into her thoughts and memories.  
  
           Or maybe he _had_ dug further. He couldn’t remember. That entire evening was rather a blur.  
  
           Apparently they had exchanged names and addresses, however, because she had called on him the next day and told him that she thought his charity was an excellent idea. He didn’t actually recall telling her about his plans, but he had been grateful for the help she offered.  
  
          “I hope not,” Charles said, realizing that his thoughts had wandered and the conversation had fallen into a lull. “I like Darwin, and I’m far too busy to be transported.”  
  
          Raven offered him a most unladylike snort. “A member of the peerage transported for offing a lowly cab driver? Perish the thought. You’d probably sit a night in the gaol and then be let out with nothing more than a slap to the wrist.”  
  
          Since the possibility that she was correct was a rather uncomfortable one, Charles allowed the remark to pass.  
  
          She reached for the newspaper on his desk. It was still neatly folded; other, more pressing matters had distracted him for most of the day. Her blue eyes skimmed over the print and she said, in a distracted voice, “You know, they identified that poor woman they found in George Yard last week.”  
  
          “Oh?” Charles feigned less interest than he felt. He already knew the woman’s name – Martha Turner, or perhaps Tabram, depending on which of the papers printed it – but he held out hope that Raven could tell him more.  
  
          He wasn’t sure why the murder had caught his attention, but he had been following the developments reported by the newspapers diligently. Perhaps his curiosity was simply a matter of proximity and timing; the woman had been killed within easy walking distance of the building that housed the Institute, and within days of their first forays into the neighborhood.  
  
          Those initial trips out had not gone well. They served the dual purpose of spreading word about the Xavier institute and giving Charles a chance to skim the thoughts of those they spoke to for any sign of the sort of people he was looking for. Raven or Moira would engage the local women in conversation about the services the Institute planned to offer while Charles hung to the back and did – whatever it was he did. ‘Mind-reading’ didn’t seem like the correct term, since it invoked images of the entertaining charlatans of the stage and since it was hardly _all_ he could do. The term ‘telepathy,’ so recently coined by the Psychical Research Society, was a better fit, but Charles found himself equally reluctant to use it when he found the research being done into psychic phenomena almost as ridiculous and much less amusing than he did the antics of stage mentalists.  
  
           Not only had Charles been entirely unsuccessful in his search, but the locals were often either depressingly neutral or outright hostile. The promise of free medical attention as provided by Hank had caused both hesitant interest and blatant mistrust, and Charles thought he knew why: to these people, hospitals and doctors’ offices were places that you didn’t come back from, or didn’t come back from intact. Too many of the local physicians were quacks, and the competent ones at the charity hospitals often ignored their patients’ wishes in a way they would never have dared to do with a more affluent clientele. Charles wasn’t too concerned about that; once they got a few patients, driven to their doors most likely by desperation as much as anything else, word would undoubtedly spread that Doctor McCoy was to be trusted, and while the populace of the East End was wary of outsiders, its people were also pragmatic enough to take advantage of anything they were offered that gave them a better chance at survival.  
  
          The offer of education was more complicated. Simply no one was interested. As one woman had so eloquently put it, “We have our own schools. Bugger off, and keep your nobby noses out of it.”  
  
          What they had were Dame Schools, one-room buildings often run by a single woman with no qualifications to teach, where the children were counted lucky if they walked away with the ability to puzzle out a few lines of the Bible.  
  
          Moira had smiled tightly. “Most of the children leave school by the time they’re ten, and the local schools often don’t teach accounting or science. We aim to offer a _complete_ education.”  
  
           The woman has snorted, looking at Moira with exhausted eyes and the silent implication that she’d rather be using the broom in her hands on her impertinent guests instead of the front stoop of her house. “My two oldest help keep bread on the table, and they can’t do that if they’re at school. When your ‘complete education’ pays them as well as the factories do, maybe they’ll get some schooling at this place o’ yours.”  
  
          “That’s an absolutely _brilliant_ idea,” Charles had said, an impulse born of frustration and the headache that had been building between his temples steadily throughout the day. He warmed quickly to the idea, however, and had been practically beaming at the woman as he continued. “ _Brilliant_. I will pay your children wages equal to those they would receive working in the factories, should they choose to attend my school and provided they work just as hard there as they do at their places of employment. Does that sound fair?”  
  
           By then, both the woman and Moira had been looking at him as if he had lost each and every one of his mental faculties. Moira had even had the audacity to say that he was looking a little peaky, and asked if he needed to have a sit down.  
  
          The woman they had been speaking to had looked thoughtful, though. “Aye,” she had said finally. “I suppose they could be spared then.” She had turned a fierce glare on Charles, lest he think that she had given in too easily or that conversing with the native denizens of the East End was _anything at all like not pulling teeth_. “But I don’t want them getting no ideas in their heads, you hear? They’ll still need to go to work after you’ve gotten bored with them and wandered off t’do whatever it is that your lot does.”  
  
           “I shall endeavor to teach them as few ideas as possible,” Charles had said, and he knew that sardonic note to his voice hadn’t been missed from the way she continued to glare at him. After that, he had let Moira do the talking for the rest of the day, and while she had still seemed dubious about the new direction his plans had taken she had dutifully reported to the rest of those they had spoken with that children who attended their school would receive the equivalent of a factory worker’s salary.  
  
          “Can we even manage that?” she had asked as they returned to the Institute at the end of the day, their feet and Charles’ head one steady, throbbing ache.  
  
          He’d waved her off. “My annual income will cover the added expense and more. It’s not like anyone pays the children much.” Just enough to be the difference between life and death for a poor family.  
  
          So – disappointing, but there was progress. Not much, but hopefully enough.  
  
          Charles was doomed to be disappointed in other ways, because Raven had nothing new to tell him, save that an inquest had been opened into Martha Tabram’s death. Already it was assumed that the jury would return a verdict of willful murder against some person or persons unknown; there was no other logical conclusion to draw from the kind of brutality Tabram had suffered.  
  
          Raven left his office only to return quarter of an hour later. Her expression turned stormy when she realized that he had gone back to his bank statements and accounts, and was now as absorbed in them as he had been the first time she had entered the office. “Charles. Darwin’s here.”  
  
          “Yes. Go on out. I’ll join you in a moment.”  
 _  
“You had better.”  
_ _  
_ In reality, a good ten minutes passed before Charles managed to drag himself away from the columns of numbers and lists of needed supplies and pack everything away into his briefcase. He did one last check of the house and then let himself out the front door, locking it behind him.  
  
          There was a group of men crowded to one side of the stoop, their heads bent low in conversation. Another man stood a few feet from them, his broad shoulders braced against the wall of Charles’ building and a cigarette held between his fingers. He didn’t join in the others’ conversation, but from the way they kept looking at him he was either their leader or someone they feared, most probably both.  
  
          The first thing Charles thought was, _Not again_.  
  
           The second thing he thought was, contradictorily enough, _Yes, please_.  
  
           The group’s leader turned toward him as he exited, making it clear that they had been waiting for Charles to step out. On the raised driver’s seat of the growler parked a few feet away from the door Charles saw Darwin start to rise, but he waved the other man off. This was nothing he couldn’t handle on his own, and he didn’t want things to escalate to a fight. Darwin wouldn’t be harmed, but Charles wanted neither bloodshed nor rumors of supernatural prowess to be associated with the Xavier Institute.  
  
          “Lovely evening, isn’t it?” he said, and smiled.  
  
          The leader just stared at him, and it was that which jogged loose Charles’ memory of where he had seen the other man before: on the stoop of a small side street off of Petticoat Lane that housed what Charles’ peers would call the ‘respectable poor.’ He had worn the same blankly cold expression when Charles had smiled at him then, although now that expression might have been tinged with a trace of hostility.  
  
          “I hear that you’re offering to pay parents to send their children to you,” the man said, because apparently they weren’t going to exchange pleasantries about the weather.  
  
          Something about his chosen phrasing was subtly off, but Charles just nodded and kept smiling. “That’s correct. We’re starting a school. Why? Do you have a child you’d like to enroll?” The man didn’t look old enough to have school-aged children, but men of the lower classes often married early. “I’m afraid we’re not quite prepared to receive pupils, but in a week or so—.”  
  
          The man’s snort effectively cut off the flow of Charles’ words.  
  
          “No,” he said, and Charles wasn’t sure which of the questions he was responding to but it also didn’t really matter. The man flicked his cigarette off into the dark, where it glowed red for a brief moment before going out. “This is a warning. Stay out of the area around Petticoat Lane. We don’t have much tolerance for flesh-peddlers – at least, not those who peddle other people’s _children_.”  
  
           It took Charles a moment to unravel meaning behind the words, but he wasn’t an idiot and understanding came quickly enough. Once it had, he was briefly so angry that he just wanted to _hit_ something. Was that really what they thought he was? He thought about doing the same to this group of men as he had done to the gang earlier – or maybe convincing them that they really were chickens, or—.  
  
           But no. This wasn’t a gang trying to intimidate him, it was just a group of working men, fearful for their children and mistrustful of the intentions of strangers. Possibly _rightfully_ mistrustful, because if they were assigning such motives to Charles it was likely that similar tragedies had happened before.  
  
           Charles took a deep breath, and then another. All the men were watching him now, and from the grim smile on their leader’s face he hadn’t missed Charles’ short wrestling match with his temper, and had most likely taken the anger as confirmation of his suspicions.  
  
          “Your warning is duly noted,” Charles said. “Although, for the record, I have no intention of _peddling_ anything other than a decent education.”  
  
           He turned on his heel and stalked over to the cab without waiting for a response, irritation still warring with compassion low in his gut. When he looked over his shoulder, the man was watching him through dangerously hooded eyes.  
  
          Charles climbed into the cab and slammed the door behind him. Raven was pale, and Moira’s mouth had set in a thin, hard line. Hank looked nervous. Undoubtedly they had heard every word.  
  
          “Go,” Charles told Darwin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See tag: Writing About Mutants Before The Discovery Of DNA Is Hard. Like most of the other historical details in this fic, I've tried for as much accuracy as possible, but my grasp of science is only slightly better than ~~that of Movie!Shaw~~ my grasp of geography. As a result, Bad Science is a distinct possibility.
> 
> I've just admitted that I know less about heredity and biology than the Victorian approximation of a geneticist would. Somewhere, my Bio101 teacher is crying into a bottle, and she doesn't even know why.
> 
> I'm aiming for a weekly update schedule, posting sometime between Friday and Monday of every week. As of next week's update, I'll have a beta reader on board, and the typos (the hideous, hideous typos) should decrease in number.


	3. Chapter 3

_August 30 th, 1888_   
  
  
         Erik lifted a hand to swipe at the sweat on his forehead. As August had lumbered determinedly toward September the weather had cooled, and the breeze coming off the Thames should have been enough to make him shiver, but unloading the ships was warm work; that was one of the few things that could be said in its favor, the other being ‘it pays.’  
  
          Irritation might have also had something to do with keeping off the chill. The docks were filled with irritants big and small today.  
  
          The first was that the foreman who had hired him on earlier that day was being awfully particular about unloading this shipment. He hovered around the men, and the implication that they didn’t know their work was scraping at _everyone’s_ temper. The crates were heavy, and voices had gone sharp or loud (depending on the disposition of the speaker) as moods had soured. Since Erik much preferred not to speak at all on the job, he had become heartily sick of the whole ordeal some hours ago, and was carefully counting the minutes before the quitting bell rang and he could collect his pay and return to the blessed silence of his attic room.  
  
           The second was Charles Xavier.  
  
          Sometime around midday, he had appeared on the docks. His was the only cheerful voice to be heard, and that was more annoying than all of the snapping and yelling the workers were doing combined. He hovered around the edges of the actual _work_ , and any time one of the men took a few moments to breath before trudging back up the gangplank for another load, Xavier took it as his invitation to start chatting merrily about his newly opened clinic and how, while they were primarily aiming to treat the surrounding neighborhoods’ women and children, any man injured on the job should feel free to seek help at the Xavier Institute – or send for Doctor McCoy if the injury was bad enough that moving from the docks was inadvisable. To be fair, Xavier wasn’t actually _interfering_ with their work, and the men he spoke to seemed to walk away a little calmer, like the bright enthusiasm in his voice had somehow seeped into them and smoothed away some of the rough edges, but the foreman had gotten even twitchier since Xavier’s arrival. Erik had spent much of the afternoon just waiting for the other man to approach him and demand an apology.  
  
           Because Erik had been wrong.  
  
          Erik did not particularly like being wrong, and he never apologized, so he wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable confrontation.  
  
          When Mrs. Leibowitz had come to him over two weeks earlier and told him about the new school that was offering to _pay_ the locals to send their children there (when even the most ill-equipped Dame School cost at least a few pence), Erik had briefly seen red. It had seemed obvious enough to him what was really going on. He had told Mrs. Leibowitz that he would take care of the problem – because she had been kind to him, and because, while Erik was neither fond of children nor particularly inclined to be shocked by the level of depravity people were often capable of, the thought of the Leibowitz children being snatched off the street by some _pimp_ had been enough to make him furious. He had justified his concern by telling himself that if the children were taken or lured away Mrs. Leibowitz would probably sob herself to sleep every night and the noise would keep him awake, and also that without them to feed and care for she would unavoidably turn _all_ of her attention to fattening him up and finding him a nice girl to marry.  
  
           He had returned to his room long enough for rational thought to return, gotten the address of this so-called “school” from Mrs. Leibowitz, and set out to prove to the interloper that while the reputation East Enders had for being dissolute enough to sell their own children was a rude fiction, their reputation for brutality was _entirely_ well-deserved.  
  
           Alex Summers had been willing enough to join Erik’s mission, and had gleefully helped to rile his flatmates enough that they had overcome their post-work stupor and followed Erik to the front door of the Xavier Institute for the Health and Education of Needy Youngsters.  
  
          There had been a growler parked in front of the building, but Erik hadn’t paid it much mind. He had been more focused on the building that housed the Xavier Institute, and the comfortingly warm glow of rage in his gut that told him he could take the place apart, nail by nail, until the entire structure crumbled into nothing but a pile of splinters and plaster dust.  
  
          Xavier had come out, Erik had delivered his warning, and then he and the boys had departed, Erik with the easy knowledge that Xavier would leave – or at least leave Erik’s little square of the world alone – or Erik would return and kill the man with his bare hands.  
  
          For a week or so he had been content, and then the school had opened.  
  
          The children who had been enrolled their because (Erik had thought) their parents were _fools_ had returned home each night, happy and well-fed, their minds bursting with new knowledge and stories of _Mr. Charles said—_ and _Miss Moira told me that—._ Erik had watched them carefully for any sign of mistreatment, but when none of them seemed to have suffered worse than the usual bumps and bruises of a too-chatty child in Whitechapel, he had been forced to confront the possibility that he had been wrong.  
  
           That had not been his best hour. His one cooking pan still looked a little warped, and Erik couldn’t seem to get it to fully reclaim its former shape.  
  
          With the realization that he had perhaps judged too quickly had come the guilt. Not for bullying Xavier, because Xavier was a grown man and obviously hadn’t been cowed enough by Erik’s threats to quit the neighborhood entirely, but because he _had_ avoided the area around Petticoat Lane. There was the nagging feeling somewhere low in Erik’s chest that perhaps his haste had resulted in the Leibowitz children, and others like them, being denied something important. A good education could mean a lot to people situated as they were. The children of the poor would never go to university to become doctors and lawyers, but it was possible that they could become clerks or scriveners with the proper schooling, and one person with a decently paying job might be the difference between continued poverty and an _entire family_ clawing its way out of the slums.  
  
           Guilt was uncomfortable. Erik much preferred anger.  
  
          However, more irritating than either of these things, than the workmen’s short tempers or the foreman’s hovering or Charles Xavier’s presence, was the man Erik had been paired to work with for the day.  
  
          It was one of the three men who had confronted Erik on the street at the start of August. Erik didn’t know his name and didn’t care to, so he just kept thinking of him as Tin Buttons, the annoying counterpart to Pin Hat and Boot Nails. Tin Buttons was apparently sober enough to work today, but that didn’t make him any less _infuriating_. This was partially because Tin Buttons seemed to have set out to infuriate, and was making it difficult for Erik to rationalize _not_ trying to shove the row of tiny metal buttons through the man’s chest. He had never murdered someone with their own buttons, but he thought he could manage it. He was certainly motivated enough.  
  
           Tin Buttons would let his side of the heavy wooden crate sag, forcing Erik to take the extra weight. Or he would drag his heels, slowing their pace to a crawl. Or he would tilt their load slightly to the side, just enough to make sure that Erik’s arms were straining to keep the already unwieldy burden from tipping. The smirk on his craggy face said clearly that he was doing it on purpose, although what that purpose was – other than driving Erik to distraction – remained a mystery. He was hardly doing himself any favors by sabotaging Erik, and the foreman had started to get a distinctly wild-eyed look every time he looked in their direction. They had already been reprimanded twice.  
  
          It couldn’t be worth it. There was no way that getting under Erik’s skin could possibly be worth getting sent home without pay, or worse if they dropped their cargo – it was something valuable, if the increasingly twitchy foreman was any indication, and Erik didn’t relish the thought of having to pay for whatever it was if a crate hit the ground. He probably _couldn’t_ , and he didn’t imagine that Tin Button’s situation was so much better than Erik’s own that he could shoulder the expense.  
  
          Out of the corner of his eye, Erik noticed Charles Xavier drifting closer, his brow knit with – something. Confusion, or maybe concern. Erik didn’t have attention to spare for noticing anything else; he had his hands full, literally and figuratively, with managing Tin Button’s antics.  
  
          Tin Button’s game this trip out seemed to be wobbling the crate back and forth, snickering softly when Erik grunted with the effort of keeping it level. His temper snapped and sizzled, especially since his abilities with metal, which he had previously used a time or two to keep their crates steady or lighten his more-than-half of the load, were absolutely useless now unless he wanted to just _levitate_ the damn thing. The nails and metal bands holding the wood together were probably enough for him to manage, and wouldn’t Tin Button’s reaction to _that_ be a sight to see?  
  
           Xavier took half a step forward, and when had he gotten so close? “Gentlemen—.”  
  
          “Go away,” Erik snarled.  
  
          Letting his attention wander, even for an instant, was a mistake.  
  
          Tin Buttons gave the crate another tilt, and this time Erik wasn’t prepared to catch it. Coarse wood slid across his palms, leaving splinters behind in the skin, before the crate overbalanced and fell. It hit the edge of the docks. Its contents, thankfully well packed, clinked softly against each other, before the entire thing tumbled end over end and into the water.  
 _  
No.  
_ _  
_ Erik reached out for the metal on the crate as it sank into the murky water of the Thames, and felt nails and the metal bands which held the corners together begin to pry loose from wood as they strained toward him. He shoved them back into place, because that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted the _entire_ crate, now sinking rapidly toward the dark bed of the river.  
  
           He _needed_ it. Needed this job, the reputation for reliability on the docks that allowed him to find work most mornings. Needed not to end up in the workhouse or the debtor’s prison, because while neither would hold him for long an escape would undoubtedly be dramatic and he’d end up having to leave London for another decade or two, until the memory of his face and the things he could do had faded from the public memory. He _needed_ to stay in London, because while there might have been a German coin beside his mother’s body, the street the body had lain on had been a British one. The trail started here, so here was where he had to be.  
  
           His feet slid forward against the worn timbers of the dock. Erik had always worked better with rage to inspire him, and the taste on the back of his tongue right now was a little too much like desperation. He stumbled, pulled forward by his hold on the metal.  
  
          The water was shockingly cold.  
  
          He heard Xavier yell something from the dock behind him, but his entire being was focused on the precious cargo plummeting toward the bottom of the river. The metal kept trying to answer his call, but without the rest of the crate those scraps of rusted iron were _useless_. Fine. If he couldn’t bring the crate to him, he would have to go to it, and hope that with his hands holding it together he could convince the reticent wood and whatever was contained within to come to the surface with the too-willing metal fittings.  
  
           There was rank water in his eyes, in his mouth, and the gasping breath he took before allowing his hold on the crate to pull him under felt wet.  
  
          Down.  
  
          The river’s current yanked at his clothing and his splayed limbs, and water too dark to see through stung his eyes. He kept his arms outstretched and reaching.  
  
          Down.  
  
          The short breath he had taken wasn’t enough, and he could feel pieces of it slipping out through his clenched lips. Small bubbles of air escaped and floated merrily back toward the surface with little concern for the fact that they were shaving minutes off of the time he could stay beneath the waves.  
  
          Down.  
  
          A hand gripped the side of his neck. An arm like a steel vice wrapped around his chest. Someone idiot had obviously decided that Erik needed _rescuing._ He snarled reflexively, and felt the last of the air he had captured in his lungs pouring out past his teeth. The back of his tongue now tasted more of the Thames than it did of desperation.  
 _  
You can’t. You’ll drown. You have to let go.  
_ _  
_ Xavier’s voice, but not in his ears. Although he could feel the man pressed to his side, they were far too deep under water for words to be so clearly heard. Xavier was, inexplicably, in Erik’s _head_ , sliding through the empty places between Erik’s whirring thoughts.  
 _  
I know what this means to you, but you’re going to die.  
_ _  
_ That had always been a possibility.  
 _  
Please, Erik, calm your mind.  
_ _  
_ He was dragging Xavier down with him. For one vicious moment, Erik didn’t care. Let Xavier drown. That was what he got for interfering.  
  
          The moment passed. Erik had already done ill by Xavier once, and a voice that sounded too much like his mother’s reminded him that death was a poor way to thank someone for risking their life to save his.  
  
          Suddenly, he _was_ calmer, and he didn’t know if it was Xavier’s voice or the ghost of his mother’s that had done it. The workhouse or the debtor’s prison, a couple years or a couple decades – it didn’t matter. If he died here, today, there would be no one to find his mother’s killer and make sure that the balance owed to her in blood was repaid. He was her _goel_ ; there was no one else to take on that duty if he was gone.  
  
          He let Xavier drag him back to the surface.  
  
          Their heads broke through the water, and Erik drank in the air. The first words he snarled out once he had breath to speak them were, _“Get off me.”_ He untangled Xavier’s limbs from around him, although he did keep a hand fisted in the front of the man’s shirt and used his grasp on the metal of the crate beneath them, now far out of reach, to keep them both anchored. The river could be dangerous, and Erik had already resolved not to die in it that day.  
  
           Within seconds one of the workers had dropped a long wooden pole into the water to drag them out. There were callused hands on Erik, towing him onto the docks, although the other men backed away quickly once he had found his feet. The mood seemed to be one of mingled wariness and admiration, the former mostly directed at him and the later directed primarily at Xavier. Their mutual dunking appeared to have convinced the docks’ workers that Xavier was a different breed from the usual upper- and middle-class men who made forays into Whitechapel, brave and tough enough (‘idiotic enough’ was, Erik felt, implied) to go racing into danger to save one of _them_. The same incident, when applied to Erik, appeared to have mostly convinced them that he was _even more of a mad bastard_ than any of them had previously suspected.  
  
           In all fairness, this unequal treatment might have also been caused by the fact Xavier was quick with a pat on the shoulder or a reassuring word, whereas Erik was quick to bar his teeth at anyone who so much as looked at him.  
  
          Anger had finally come to him, too late to do him much good.  
  
          “Lehnsherr!”  
  
          The foreman had arrived on the scene. Erik sighed, and some of his anger drained away, to be replaced by what felt suspiciously like defeat. His eyes scanned the gathered crowd for Tin Buttons, but his erstwhile tormentor was not among the other men. He had undoubtedly eeled away somewhere to let Erik face the consequences on his own.  
  
          “Sir,” Erik said, and then belatedly pulled down his lips to cover the snarl he was still wearing.  
  
          Glaring down at Erik couldn’t have been a simple task, since the foreman was easily a hand and a half shorter, but he seemed determined to manage it. His chest had puffed out with indignation, and there was white showing around the edges of his irises. “What happened here?” He didn’t even give Erik a chance to respond before plowing on. “No, I don’t even care. Who’s going to _pay_ for that?”  
  
           To that question there was no answer that Erik could give, and both he and the foreman jumped a little when Xavier spoke. “I will. Have the bill forwarded to,” and he rattled off an address in a much better part of London. The foreman was almost incandescently red at that point, and Erik could see him fighting down the urge to argue with someone who could probably have him brought up on charges at a whim.  
  
          Instead, he turned his wrath on Erik. “Count yourself lucky that I don’t take it out of your hide,” he growled. He raised his hand to deliver a blow, and Erik realized that his hold on his own temper was uncertain enough that he probably wouldn’t take the knock calmly. He would lash out with his fists, or perhaps his power, and then _he_ would be the one up on charges.  
  
           Two decades.  
  
          He could wait that long. It might be worth it.  
  
          Xavier was there in an instant, his body positioned subtly in front of Erik so that he would be the one to take the hit. The threatening hand fell back to the foreman’s side, and Erik struggled between feeling gratitude and feeling _furious_ at the idea of being even further in this ridiculous man’s debt.  
  
           “You’re dismissed,” the foreman sputtered. “I don’t want to ever see your ugly Jew face on these docks again. Don’t even _think_ about trying to claim wages for the day.” He waved both of his hands through the air, like maybe he was reconsidering his decision not to hit Xavier. “Go! Get on!”  
  
           Xavier’s hand closed on Erik’s arm, and Erik found himself being dragged toward the gates to the docks. The men who had gathered around them only minutes earlier were averting their eyes now, as if Erik had suddenly become invisible. As if he had never picked up their slack when they were sick or just sick with the previous night’s drink; as if he hadn’t been working these same docks for over a year now, and doing his job just as well as any of them. A man with a particularly bushy blond beard met his gaze for the briefest of instants before turning away, his cheeks flushed red beneath the hair on his face with what might have been shame.  
  
          Erik understood. None of them could afford to lose their work if the foreman decided they were guilty by association. The little pay they made kept their families fed.  
  
          Understanding did marvelously little to soothe him.  
  
          “Well, that was exciting,” Xavier said as they approached the gates. His grip on Erik’s arm hadn’t slacked. “Is your foreman usually so testy?”  
  
          “He’s been like that all day,” Erik responded automatically, more interested in letting his mind play over the last few minutes than he was in listening to Xavier talk. “Must’ve been moving something valuable.”  
  
          “Chinese porcelain,” Xavier said, with little enough pause that Erik glanced at him sideways. “I’ve been meaning to acquire some. My dinner service is woefully out of date.”  
  
          “Too bad your new purchase is now at the bottom of the Thames.”  
  
          Xavier continued as if Erik hadn’t spoken. “Of course, it could have also been he was concerned about the opium he’s been smuggling in with those shipments.” He tutted softly. “How very devious of him. I admire initiative, but I can’t help but think that perhaps I should mention his little side business to someone. Like the desk sergeant at the local police station. What do you think?”  
  
          They had cleared the gates, and Erik dug his heels into the street, refusing to be dragged any further. Xavier cast him a quizzical glance, like he couldn’t fathom why Erik would mind being pulled along like an errant child, but finally released the hold he had on Erik’s arm. The way he rubbed the hand against his the leg of trousers, like he had touched something _unclean_ , and never mind that they were both soaked and filthy from their swim in the river, almost tugged on Erik’s never-far-from-reach anger enough to distract him from the rest of what Xavier had done that day, but not quite. “You were in his head. You were in _my_ head. How did you do that?”  
  
           Xavier had an abstracted frown on his face now, and he reached out and placed a careful hand on Erik’s shoulder. Erik thought about shaking the hand off , but he wanted answers badly enough to tolerate the contact.  
  
          “You have your tricks,” Xavier said. “I have mine.” Then, in case Erik hadn’t gotten it, “I’m like you.”  
  
          That explanation did absolutely nothing to calm Erik’s thoughts. His irritation crumpled under the weight of his curiosity and the first reluctant stirrings of excitement. Like him. He hadn’t thought – he hadn’t know. There had never _been_ anyone like him before. He had never been given an explanation for why it was he could do the these things, and over the years he had grown resigned to the fact that he was the only one who could do them.  
  
           Like him.  
  
          This changed everything.  
  
          “I thought I was alone.”  
  
          He had meant it to be a simple statement of fact. Instead, the words came out sounding strained and maybe a little broken.  
  
          A smile bloomed on Xavier’s face, small but sincere. His hair was dripping water into his eyes, but he didn’t seem to notice. “You’re not alone.” His hand on Erik’s shoulder gave one hard squeeze, as if he would press the words into Erik’s flesh. “Erik, you’re not alone.”  
  
          There was more comfort in that simple sentence than Erik had ever expected to feel. His shoulders sagged, the events of the day weighing heavy against them. Behind the sudden rush of exhaustion, however, was something very like relief.  
  
          “Come along,” Xavier said, motioning for Erik to follow him up the street. “We’re both sopping, and you’re tired. Let me see you home.”  
  
          Erik _was_ tired, far too tired to argue. He allowed Xavier to lead him toward home, not even questioning how the other man knew the way. They hadn’t gone very far when Xavier said, “I’ve been remiss in my introductions, I realize. Charles Xavier.”  
  
           He wanted to say, _And when would you have introduced yourself? While we were neck-deep in the water?_ Instead he just nodded and said, “I know.”  
  
           Xavier looked pleased.  
  
          They had reached the front of Erik’s building before Xavier spoke again. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’d very much like to make your bad luck my own good fortune.” When Erik just stared at him, he shrugged, waving a hand through the air like a magician trying to conjure the explanation Xavier had yet to offer. “I’ve been looking for a porter or two for the Institute. Either Doctor McCoy or myself tend to spend evenings there, but I’d prefer that there be other staff on hand to assist, and I think it would be _endlessly_ useful to have people working for us who actually know the neighborhood and its denizens.” He smiled winningly at Erik. “Would you be interested in a job?”  
  
           Erik was silent. He didn’t really know what he was supposed to say. Two weeks ago, he had threatened this man and called him a flesh-peddler. Now Xavier was settling his debts, jumping into large bodies of water after him, and offering him a job. That kind of generosity just didn’t make any kind of sense. Then again, Erik thought with a low surge of resentment, Xavier could afford to be generous.  
  
          That wasn’t right, either, though, because Mrs. Leibowitz fed him with food from her own table when he knew that she had little enough to spare, and wealth might pay for China porcelain and new servants, but it didn’t explain someone jumping into the Thames to save a hostile stranger. Perhaps some people were just born to be kind.  
  
          Erik grimaced at the thought.  
  
          “I didn’t start the Xavier Institute only to alleviate suffering in Whitechapel,” Xavier said, low and earnest. “From the start, one of my goals has been to find others like us and... Oh, I don’t know. Help them, if I can. I would like you to be a part of that.” He reached out to touch Erik again, then seemed to think better of it and let his hand drop. “I told you that you weren’t alone, my friend. Give me a chance to prove it.”  
  
          Erik weighed the sincerity in Xavier’s voice. “You’re in my head again,” he said, mostly to buy himself time.  
  
          “Sorry,” Xavier said reflexively. He paused, cleared his throat, and added in a quieter voice: “Do you mind?”  
  
          He considered. He didn’t, not really. It was – nice, almost, not to feel quite so isolated. The very fact that he _was_ so unbothered by the intrusion was almost enough to get Erik’s defenses up. He was a private person by nature, and it didn’t sit well that he was so easy with Xavier’s breaching his mind. At the very least, he could see Xavier’s constant knowledge of his thoughts becoming annoying with time, and he wasn’t sure he should give the other man carte blanche to continue.  
  
           “No,” he said. “I don’t mind.”  
  
          “I don’t always do it,” Xavier said hastily. “I just – I was concerned that you wouldn’t like my offer. You’re a proud man, and I don’t want you to think of this as charity.”  
  
          Erik snorted, because of _course_ this was charity. Xavier had nearly said as much – he wanted to _help_ Erik, the same way he wanted to help the poor unfortunates of Whitechapel if for a very different reason. Erik’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How much is the pay?”  
  
           “Half a pound per week, and—Erik, stop it. _This isn’t charity_. Of course I’m offering you better than dock wages, but it’s no more than the footmen at my country house make, and they receive clothing, room, and board on top of it. You’ll be providing an essential service for me. I’ll be paying you a not unreasonable amount in return for that service. You won’t go to the workhouse or debtor’s prison or be forced to flee the country when you use your truly _intriguing_ abilities with metal to affect a daring escape—.”  
  
           “You heard that?”  
  
          Xavier considered him for a moment. “I heard all of it. We can discuss the rest at your leisure when you come to work for me.”  
  
          All of it. His mother. Her death. The entire reason he had come back to London. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be willing to discuss any of that with Xavier. “I haven’t agreed to work for you yet.”  
  
          The look Xavier offered him was frankly skeptical. Erik could admit that he probably deserved that look. The offer was too good to pass up, and he had perilously few other options left open to him. He clung, however, to the shaky belief that he might do this on his own terms rather than Xavier’s. “I haven’t. I’ll consider your proposition, but I have a condition I would like you to meet before I do even that much.”  
  
          Another man situated as Xavier was might have laughed at the notion that Erik was in any position to be making demands. Xavier merely looked curious, and that made Erik like him a little better. “Oh?”  
  
          “The Leibowitz children.” Erik struggled to find the right words, and ended up tapping his temple in tacit permission for Xavier to snoop.  
  
          “Hmm? Oh, I see. Yes, of course. I would be happy to accept them as students. Assuming your embargo on Petticoat Lane has been lifted, I would be happy to take on _any_ of the area’s children, but I’ll make sure to reserve spots for those four.” He smiled again at Erik, obviously elated, and then tilted his head as if listening to some distant music. “I think I would like to meet your Mrs. Leibowitz. She seems a delightful woman.”  
  
           “I think she would like you,” Erik allowed. “Provided that I tell her first that you’re not aiming to sell her children to lecherous old men with depraved tastes.”  
  
          Xavier winced. “Ah. Yes.”  
  
          “Of course, once I have, a meeting will become inadvisable. I have no desire to watch the constables attempt to figure out whether feeding a man until he bursts at the seams is actually a form of manslaughter.”  
  
          For a moment, Xavier stared at him. His brows arched upwards until they were nearly buried under the dripping wet fringe of his hair. “Erik,” he said, in tones of revelation. “I do believe you just made a joke.”  
  
          “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Erik said.  
  
          “As you like it,” Xavier replied placidly. He shook his head. “Well, I’m chilled through, and I can’t imagine you’re much better off. I hope I’ll see you shortly, however?”  
  
          The fact that he made it a question was also enough to warm Erik somewhat to the idea of working for the man, although Xavier almost immediately ruined it by adding, “I’d like you to start work tomorrow morning, if that’s at all possible. Mostly the work will be nights, at least until I find a second porter, but you should take a chance to acclimate yourself to the Institute during daylight hours. You’ll have a six day work week, and you may choose which day you take as your own. The Sabbath, if you like.”  
  
          “That won’t be required,” Erik said. The docks did not keep the same schedule that the East End’s Jews did, and Erik hadn’t really observed the Sabbath for many years now. When his mother was alive, yes, but most of his faith had died with her. Her death and the life he had lead following it had turned out to be mutually exclusive with the belief in a benevolent God. “I’ll be there early tomorrow,” he waited until Xavier had relaxed into another smile and then offered one of his own, with more tooth than was strictly necessary, “ _if_ I decide to take the job.”  
  
           The expression on Xavier’s face warred briefly between reproach and amusement. “That wasn’t very nice, my friend.”  
  
          “I’m not a very nice man,” Erik said with a shrug. He went to touch the brim of his hat, only to realize it was probably floating out to sea as they spoke. “Until we meet again, Xavier.” He turned to go up the steps, but was stopped by Xavier’s voice.  
  
          “I wish you’d call me Charles.”  
  
          Erik glanced over his shoulder. He shook his head but didn’t respond. Really, Charles Xavier was the most ridiculous creature ever conceived by nature.  
  
          Mrs. Leibowitz was on the landing again, this time gossiping with the woman whose family lived across the landing from her. She shooed the other woman away when she saw Erik, and her eyes had gone wide. “What’s happened to you, _mein Jüngelchen_?” She didn’t wait for him to respond before hustling him in through her open door. With terrifying efficiency, she got him stripped out of his wet clothes and into her husband’s second pair of trousers, and he spent the next hour warming his skin and cooling his heels in front of her fire. He bit back the guilty certainty that she had built the fire for his benefit, because fuel was another thing too dear to waste and winter was coming. As with the food, Mrs. Leibowitz wouldn’t take kindly to him questioning her openhandedness.  
  
           Reluctant word by reluctant word, she dragged the story of that afternoon from between Erik’s teeth. When he was done, she looked up from the tub where she had put his clothing to soak, her eyes narrowed, and said, “This foreman of yours – you want I should _talk_ to him?”  
  
           Images of Mrs. Leibowitz smacking his former boss with a wooden spoon assaulted Erik’s mind. _“No.”_ He cleared his throat. “It’s been taken care of. Thank you.”  
  
           “Humph,” Mrs. Leibowitz said, but she seemed content to turn her frustrations to scrubbing anything that even resembled a stain out of his clothing. Erik wondered idly if he would have a shirt left to wear by the time she was through, but said nothing. He stayed for a while longer before retreating to his own flat, but not before she had thrust a shirt on him and promised to deliver his newly clean clothing once it was dry.  
  
          Erik was rarely home much before nightfall, and he found himself at a loss for what to do with his time. He flipped through books he had already read so many times that the pages were worn and tattered. He claimed a cigarette from Alex, because his own pack had been ruined by his dip in the river and the younger man was the only one, excepting the women, who was home at this time of day (Erik assumed because he conducted most of his business after dark, but again didn’t ask). He played with the _thaler_ found by his mother’s body, passing the cool metal between his fingers without touch as the sun sank lower on the horizon. Mostly he thought, about what had come to pass that day and what it might mean for the future.  
  
           At sunset, someone knocked on the door. It was Mrs. Leibowitz, his clothes in her arms, and behind her was a man. It took Erik a moment to recognize the bushy-bearded stranger whose hands were currently mauling his own hat, but eventually he placed him as one of the workers from the docks, the one whose cheeks had been stained with red at his inability to meet Erik’s gaze.  
  
          “Lehnsherr,” the man grumbled, once Mrs. Leibowitz had thrust Erik’s clothing at him and departed. “Good thing you did today. Not many men who’d go after lost cargo like that.”  
  
          Erik remained silent, allowing the polite fiction that it had been diligence and not desperation that had motivated him to dive into the Thames and wondering idly what the man could be doing on his doorstep.  
  
          “Got a cousin,” the man continued awkwardly. He still wouldn’t meet Erik’s eyes. “Works as a tosher. He’s always looking for a man or two to help him out. Thought you might be interested.”  
  
          The toshers worked in London’s sewers, searching the muck for small valuables that had been washed down the drains – nails and bits of scrap metal, sometimes coins. Erik didn’t doubt that he would be very good at that kind of work, and the pay wasn’t bad. The pay _couldn’t_ be bad; it was dirty, back-breaking work, and dangerous besides when the rains came and the sewers flooded. No one remained a tosher for long, not if he had any choice in the matter.  
  
           He pondered what had motivated the man to make such an offer. Erik didn’t even know his name. Perhaps it was kindness, or perhaps it was an attempt to assuage his own guilt at what had transpired on the docks earlier. Ultimately, the reason didn’t matter; what mattered was that he had come to Erik’s door with an offer of work, never easy to find in London’s slums.  
  
          “No,” Erik said finally, and the man looked up at him for the first time since his arrival. “No. I’m afraid that I’ve already accepted a job elsewhere.”


	4. Chapter 4

_August 30 th, 1888  
_ _  
  
_“My God, Charles.”  
  
           Charles, who had been in the process of sneaking in through the front door of his Berkeley Square house, stopped. He looked up at where Raven was standing on the stairs directly across from the door, her expression frozen in a look of mingled horror and laughter. Since he was caught anyway, he straightened his spine and put down the shoes he had removed before entering the house to ensure more effective tiptoeing. He turned his most benevolently innocent smile on Raven, even though he didn’t think it would do any good: while that smile had worked wonders on their nursemaids and governesses as a child, and on his lovers as an adult, Raven knew him too well to be taken in by the appearance of innocent charm.  
  
          She might let him hear the end of this. Probably sometime around the second Tuesday after ‘never.’  
  
          “Funny,” he said. “Darwin greeted me in exactly the same way.”  
  
          “He let you into his cab in your current state?”  
  
          “He works in London. He’s undoubtedly had worse than me in his cab.”  
  
          She shook her head. “And you – what? Decided to take a swim with your clothing still on?”  
  
          “More or less.”  
  
          “Why,” she started to ask, then shook her head again. “Never mind. We can talk about it while I have your man draw you a hot bath. You don’t have much time before our guests arrive.” She studied the puddle of water that had formed around Charles’ thick woolen stockings. “I’ll have someone clean up the mess, but the housekeeper is going to have a seizure. She’s been scrubbing all day to make the place fit for company.”  
  
          Charles glanced around, and took note of the floors, dark and shining, and the fresh flowers crowded on every available surface. There were cerise azaleas for abundance and pink carnations for gratitude, and speckled through the arrangements were pale, tiny dots of baby’s breath with its meaning of ‘festivity’ – just the kind of flowers that one might set up at a dinner party where one meant to cajole friends and acquaintances into helping with a newly opened charity. Charles wondered if Raven had been the one to pick out the flowers, but rather suspected Moira or the housekeeper. Raven had never had much of an interest in flowers (or embroidery, or drawing, or music, or any of the other appropriately feminine pursuits that Sharon Marko _née_ Xavier had gently guided her “daughter” toward over the years) other than the bouquet of blue larkspur that Charles gifted her with on the anniversary of their first meeting every year, less because of its symbolic meaning (although he would maintain that Raven did have a beautiful spirit) than because it perfectly matched the color of her rarely-glimpsed natural form.  
  
           He knew that Raven would have preferred to take that form during the hours spent in their home, but the servants didn’t know about their employers’ oddities, and Charles couldn’t afford to dismiss them. Putting aside the fact that it would be a horrible way to repay people who had offered the family years of loyal service, the servants and the appearance of respectability they gave the Xaviers, like the house in town, were things he needed in order to secure Raven’s future.  
  
          Sometimes he would find her awake at night, long after the rest of the household was asleep, her face larkspur blue and her eyes brilliantly golden, staring into a mirror by lamplight like she would impress the image on her memory as surely as it was imprinted on her skin-beneath-the-skin.  
  
          “The house is always fit for company,” Charles said, as he allowed her to lead him up the stairs. “Lord, you have enough callers all on your own to ensure that.”  
  
          The look of disgust on Raven’s face was enough to silence him on the subject. His sister was blond, pretty, of good name and of even better fortune. Of course she had more suitors calling at her door than she could name. The problem was, she didn’t seem to want any of them, and Charles wasn’t about to force her into a marriage she didn’t choose.  
  
          For once, however, Raven didn’t let the subject drop gracefully. “And which of them would take me?” she asked quietly.  
  
          “Which of them _wouldn’t_?” Charles asked, already distracted by plans of what he would say, what he would do, to secure the support of the people he had invited that night. “You’re stunning.”  
  
           “Like this?”  
  
          Something in her voice drew him up short, and it was only then that he realized he had gone a few paces without her by his side. He turned and watched as the healthy peach of her skin became deep cobalt. Her hair went from blond to vividly red, the kind of red rarely if ever found in nature. For a moment, blue eyes not unlike his own stared at him out of the face of a near-stranger, before those too shifted and turned yellow. Charles glanced over his shoulder to make sure that none of the servants were present, and Raven sighed.  
  
          “If you wanted to know why I’ve turned away every young man who’s tried to court me,” she said, “you have your answer. I have no interest in living out the rest of my life with someone whose first instinct will be to hide me, if he knows what I am at all.”  
  
          Charles was left with the feeling that he had made a horrible misstep, and no idea as to how. Too often conversation with his sister left him confused, and he wasn’t used to that kind of confusion. His telepathy usually shielded him from social mishap, but Raven was an unknown quantity, her mind kept a mystery by his own promise not to pry.  
  
          More to the point, that same promise kept him from figuring out not only where he had gone wrong, but how he should fix it. Still, he was almost certain that, “You’re being ridiculous,” was not the way to go about things. The fact that his certainty came approximately ten seconds after saying the words aided nothing. He cleared his throat and continued, ignoring the way her expression had darkened. “We’ve talked about this, Raven. It’s one thing when you slip,” because there had been times, too many to count, when she had been younger and her ability to transform herself less stable, and Charles had been forced to trifle with the memories of those around them to avoid undue attention being paid to his pretty, blond, and occasionally _blue_ sister, “but the consequences of your being seen as you are now would be unthinkable.”  
  
           People were not known for their tolerance of the new or _other_ , and Raven was more other than any of them. Too often, Charles had heard the vitriol directed at anyone deemed foreign-looking or strange – in people’s minds if not on their lips – and those who drew that kind of hate were known quantities, seen on the streets of London every day. The thought of how Raven would be treated if people were to know about her made him feel anxious and a little sick.  
  
          She considered him evenly for a moment. “You’re so outspoken about us accepting our differences, about how our extra-human abilities are a gift.” She sighed again, and her familiar face returned, all soft pink cheeks with nary a streak of blue or a rough scale to mar them. “Does your tolerance extend only so far as those whose differences are pretty, or invisible, like yours?”  
  
          For a brief moment, Charles was consumed by how _unfair_ that was. He had never been bothered by her blue form, nor by Hank’s feet; every request he had ever made of her to hide what she could do had been motivated by his desire to keep her safe. He failed to see how that was any worse than her desire to keep him out of her head, and he respected her wishes in that – as he respected Moira’s never-spoken but there nonetheless discomfort with any invasion, and as he planned to respect and not abuse Erik Lehnsherr’s tentative permission to invade.  
  
           “It doesn’t matter to me whether you’re blue or green or purple-and-red plaid,” he said miserably. “You’re my oldest friend.”  
  
          He was afraid it wouldn’t be enough, but Raven eventually cracked a smile. “I’m your _only_ friend.”  
  
           It wasn’t quite true, not anymore, but he allowed himself an appreciative chuckle anyway. “Thank you for that.”  
  
          She was silent as they went the rest of the way down the hall to his rooms, but by the time his man had drawn up a bath she was back to teasing him (“Purple-and-red plaid, Charles? Really? No wonder your valet despairs of you.”). He let the argument fade from his mind as he sank into the bath, the decorative oriental screen that hid his bathing area from view preserving at least some pretense of decency between the siblings, although his valet kept shooting him scandalized looks which said clearly that the man not only despaired of Charles but secretly despised him.  
  
          Once she was done mocking his admittedly lacking sense of fashion, Charles shifted their conversation toward the day’s events. “You asked how I came to be in this state. I had the most interesting time at the docks today.”  
  
          “Oh? Did someone get tired of your impertinence and decide to push you in?”  
  
          Charles frowned, not that Raven had seen it. “Not quite. One of the workers went in. I went in after him.”  
  
          “Oh, Charles.” Her tone broadly implied that Charles’ valet wasn’t alone in despairing of him.  
  
          “You don’t understand,” Charles said. “He’s—.” His valet was still present, carefully pressing the wrinkles out of the suit Charles would wear to dinner and doing a bad job of pretending not to listen. “Different,” he said, and hoped that Raven would catch on.  
  
          The valet looked even more scandalized. Charles took a quick peek inside the man’s head, and found that he had interpreted ‘different’ as ‘a most enthusiastic sodomite, and the master is now infatuated with a _dock worker_.’ Charles sighed. It was better than the truth, and he knew that his employees could at least be trusted to be discrete when it came to his personal life.  
  
           Raven, however, seemed to have grasped his true meaning. “You don’t say.” Her tone was carefully noncommittal, but he could hear the suppressed excitement in her voice. He shared that excitement; weeks in Whitechapel, and this was the first they had found of their own kind.  
  
          “Quite. He has the most _curious_ talent for metal. Almost as though it bends to his will.”  
  
           “You had an opportunity to observe this at the docks? Or did he – tell you?” The slight hesitation, and he didn’t need to read her mind to know that she was wondering if he had read Erik’s.  
  
          “I witnessed his talents firsthand. Although we’ve met him before. The gentleman outside of the Xavier Institute? About two weeks past?”  
  
          He could almost hear her thinking as she tried to place the memory. “The one who _threatened_ you?” she exclaimed, before she remembered the valet’s presence. The valet simply continued to look scandalized, and maybe a little weary, as though this was what he had learned to expect from Charles Xavier.  
  
           “To be perfectly fair,” Charles said, “he thought that he had good reason to threaten me. I would have threatened me, were I in his place.” He cleared his throat. “He has reconsidered his position on the matter, I believe. In fact, he’s to be our new porter at the Institute.”  
  
          “Oh. Charles.” The way she said the words was almost identical to the way she had said them minutes earlier, but there was a hint of tolerant amusement to her voice, like hiring men who had once threatened his life was something she had come to anticipate him doing and a foible she was willing to indulge. Charles had no idea why. It wasn’t like he had ever done so _before_.  
  
           Raven left to see to her own preparations, and Charles finished his bath and allowed his valet to dress him in the dinner jacket and trousers required for such an event. It was strange to be dressing for dinner in his own home; he and Raven rarely bothered with formal dinner dress, and while Charles loved a good party he rarely hosted. Kurt had done so often, but Charles had been away at school for most of those events and since his stepfather’s death he had been absorbed in finishing his studies and starting his charity. There had been no time for formal parties. Sometimes Moira and Hank would come by for dinner, but those were strategy sessions as much as anything else and neither of them cared how he and Raven chose to dress: Hank often arrived still smelling faintly of the chemicals he used in his laboratory, and Moira’s mode of dress was impeccably fashionable while still somehow giving the impression that she would never hold others to the same standards.  
  
          As if his thoughts had summoned them, he found Moira and Hank waiting downstairs once he was dressed. He smiled at Hank and pressed Moira’s gloved hand, then allowed the footman to take their coats and lead them into the parlor.  
  
          The rest of the guests arrived soon after, and within a few hours Charles was beginning to wish that they hadn’t.  
  
          Most of his guests were a delight. There were a few women Charles had invited on their own merits (although they were, of course, permitted to bring their husbands), because they had shown interest in the past in donating both their time the contents of their purses to social causes. There were two doctors with their spouses, and a few academics Charles knew from his Oxford days. A socialite or two had been added to the mix, along with their mamas, because such women were adept at keeping a party in comfortably polite waters and because their mamas were more than willing to lend the talents of these young beauties to any event where an eligible bachelor might be present. Charles was a particularly eligible bachelor, and none of the mamas had been happy when he had chosen to escort his sister into dinner instead of one of their admittedly charming daughters (the daughters had been saddled primarily with the academics, and since most of the academics were attractive young men who had been Charles’ friends at school, the daughters did not look nearly as disappointed as their mamas).  
  
          The politicians, however, were less than delightful.  
  
          Colonel Hendry was a veteran of both the Crimean War and the Boer War, after which he had retired to politics. Sebastian Shaw was a lifelong politician and the darling of the London social scene. Both carried a fair amount of clout, which was why they had been invited to this particular dinner. Both had deep pockets, which was another reason; Charles could keep the Institute running from his own income indefinitely, but if it was to grow and continue on past his involvement, other donors and more help would be needed. Hendry and Shaw were often allies in Parliament, which was why Charles hadn’t foreseen there being any difficulty in putting them in a room together. What he hadn’t realized until there was nothing but a dinner table to separate the two men was that they might cooperate when it came to politics, but they didn’t much _like_ each other. All Charles had been able to glean from Hendry’s mind that he rather resented some of Shaw’s back room deals, or possibly just resented that he hadn’t been included in them.  
  
           Shaw’s mind was an enigma, as it always had been. Charles had never been able to read either Shaw or his lovely but undeniably cold wife, Emma. Emma Frost had been one of the most sought-after beauties of their circle before her marriage to Shaw, although Charles had never much seen the appeal. Emma was gorgeous, and reserved in the way that so many British men seemed unable to resist, but Charles had always imagined that embracing her would be a bit too much like wrapping one’s arms around a statue made of diamond.  
  
          The mystery presented by the couple was much more interesting than the charms of the wife. He simply _couldn’t_ read them. Certain people, like Moira, were _difficult_ to read due to their strength of will, strong desire for privacy, or both, but Charles had never failed to divine someone’s mind entirely before meeting the Shaws and, much to his chagrin, Sebastian Shaw’s dreadfully superior personal assistant, a Mr. Janos Quested. Charles had never been able to discern why he couldn’t penetrate their minds, and often wondered if his dislike for Shaw, who was otherwise amiable if a bit overbearing, was simply frustration.  
  
           Tonight he had decided that his dislike for Shaw was just that: dislike. Dinner would have gone well had it not been for Shaw’s subtle sniping at Hendry and Hendry’s less-than-subtle responses. Some of the ladies had started to look exhausted from the strain of constantly dragging the conversation back to more pleasant topics, and Charles had started to feel a little worn himself from his repeated attempts to introduce to the gathered company his ideas regarding the Xavier Institute. Raven was no help; she just watched the volleys being passed back and forth between Shaw and Hendry like a particularly avid spectator at a badminton match. Hank had tried, but he was too deferential to cut off a conversation at the knees and had been easily silenced by the two men. Moira, who usually would have been Charles’ first choice as an ally, had been silent and watchful for most of dinner; Charles had gathered at some point past that she wasn’t overly fond of Shaw, although when he had asked her about it she had simply murmured, “I don’t enjoy his company, and would choose not to associate with him if given the choice,” which was both an answer and the _least revealing_ answer she could have possibly offered. What Shaw had done to offend her remained as much a mystery as the man’s mind, and Moira’s obvious reluctance to speak of it had been enough to keep him from dragging the answer from her mind. Barely.  
  
           Still, dinner hadn’t gone too horribly awry. The food was good, and that gave his guests something polite to talk about. Somewhere around the end of the second course the entire company seemed to have mutually decided to ignore Hendry and Shaw’s conversation, and Charles had been able to introduce the subject he had truly gathered them to discuss. Hank had followed Charles’ lead with the enthusiasm that a drowning man had for a raft, and they had managed to drum up some tentative interest in their plans before the end of dinner.  
  
          Unfortunately, with the end of the meal came the ladies’ departure for the parlor, leaving the men to their drinks and their cigars and leaving Charles with no defense against getting cornered into one-on-one conversation with Shaw except for Hank and his Oxford friends, the latter of whom cast him sympathetic glances but seemed much more interested in discussing the very lovely young women Charles had introduced them to and decimating Charles’ stock of port and brandy.  
  
          When Shaw had opened the conversation with, “Now Charles, you must tell me more about this charity of yours,” Charles had foolishly allowed himself to feel hope. He might not like Shaw, but that didn’t mean he had any qualms about making the man useful. Shaw could shift popular opinion very easily, either for or against Charles’ endeavors; he was well connected, well respected,  and incredibly wealthy. The very fact that he and his wife had accepted Charles’ invitation tonight would be enough to get tongues wagging about Charles Xavier and the charitable organization he was trying to start in Whitechapel, and what Shaw said about the gathering and Charles’ ideas could very easily make or break Charles’ attempts to find allies and supporters among the British elite.  
  
          That had been nearly half an hour ago.  
  
          In that time, Shaw had asked increasingly close questions about the Xavier Institute, its mission and its operation. Charles had ended up drinking a little more of his very good brandy than he might have otherwise, mostly to stave off his growing irritation with the line of questioning Shaw had taken. He wasn’t sure _why_ Shaw’s interest bothered him, especially since the questions the other man asked were, for the most part, nothing that a perspective investor wouldn’t want to know. Perhaps because Shaw hadn’t actually expressed an interest in donating to the charity’s funding.  
  
           He slipped once or twice while answering Shaw’s questions, and he was no longer sure whether the brandy or his inability to take cues from Shaw’s mind was to blame. Finally, Shaw settled back in his chair, sipping contemplatively at his own drink. The fine cigar he had produced after the ladies had exited had sat forgotten in the ashtray, slowly burning itself into oblivion, but he picked it up now.  
  
          “As you undoubtedly know,” he said, “I have contributed to charities in the Whitechapel district and Spitalfields before, as well as abroad. I think giving to the less fortunate is very important.” He said it in the rote, disinterested tone of a man who thought that giving was important more because it was expected of him by society than because he really had any actual desire to do so. “I believe I am very interested in contributing to your little venture, Charles. As you know, I was great friends with your stepfather, and while I’m not entirely certain he would agree with the course you’ve decided to take, I feel that he would like me to support you in it, as he undoubtedly would have.”  
  
          Privately, Charles disagreed. It was true that Kurt Marko had never bothered with even the token showing of conspicuous charity that Shaw made, and he had always been very concerned that Charles make a Name For Himself, something that Charles’ current course of action would never offer. No, Kurt wouldn’t have approved, and without his approval there would have been no support. Ultimately it wouldn’t have mattered – the laws of inheritance had made the majority of Brian Xavier’s considerable fortune his son’s as soon as Charles reached the age of majority, and the family’s solicitors hadn’t allowed that inheritance to be significantly damaged by Kurt’s love of luxury or his mismanagement of Brian Xavier’s estate.  
  
          However, if believing that Kurt had been a loving and indulgent replacement father figure moved Shaw to generosity, Charles was more than willing to keep silent on the matter. “Any support you would care to offer would be very deeply appreciated,” he said politely.  
  
          Shaw put down his cigar. “I’m perfectly willing to draw you a cheque tonight,” he said. Hendry, sitting close enough to them that Charles hadn’t needed to read the man’s mind to know he was listening to every word, sputtered a bit and began patting the pockets of his jacket in search of his own chequebook.  
  
          To have Shaw pledge his support financially had been more that Charles had dared hope for. He immediately felt foolish for his earlier suspicion; apparently Shaw wished to invest after all, which meant that there was nothing even remotely untoward about his questions. More important even than the money (which was not currently of chief concern to Charles) was the fact that this would be real, tangible evidence that Shaw saw value in his efforts. What Sebastian Shaw valued was valued in turn by all of England. The donations and the offers of help would pour in.  
  
          “Of course,” Shaw continued, “I’ll wish to tour your facility. It’s merely good business to make sure my money is being put to good use, and I do the same with all of my charities.” He smirked. “In your case it’s merely a formality, but I can’t be showing favoritism just because of my fondness for your family, can I?”  
  
          It wasn’t an unreasonable request. “It would be an honor to have you visit the Institute,” he said, because even given Shaw’s generosity Charles couldn’t honestly say that it would be a _pleasure_. “I would request that you give us some time to put your donation to use and make sure that both the clinic and the school are in good working order before you come by for a tour, however.”  
  
           “A month and a half,” Shaw said, after some deliberation. “I’ll have Janos put the appointment in my calendar for the middle of October.” When Charles nodded cautiously, Shaw smiled. “I look forward to it. Until then, you should join Emma and me on the yacht sometime.” He jerked his head toward Hendry. “Robert has gone out with us a time or two, and intends to again sometime soon. We could all make a day of it.”  
  
          Hendry grunted but didn’t look up from the cheque he was scrawling out. He was having trouble determining what to write for the amount; he wanted to outdo Shaw, but Shaw had made no move to draw up his own cheque yet. “The _Caspartina_ is a fine boat,” he said grudgingly. “Sebastian is fortunate to have her.”  
  
           “Yes,” Shaw murmured. “I have been _incredibly_ fortunate when it comes to the ladies in my life.” Charles might have thought it sweet that Shaw spoke with such open affection about his wife, but since he had essentially just grouped the wife with the boat and the smile on his lips spoke of equally proprietary feelings for both, ‘sweet’ didn’t seem to be quite the word. “On that note, I do believe we’ve left the women on their own long enough. We should join them.” Charles wondered if Shaw realized how insulting it was for him to be playing the host in Charles’ home. Probably. Shaw rarely insulted someone without first intending to do so.  
  
           Shaw slanted a glance at him and added, “You’ll forgive me if I wait until the end of the evening to write you that cheque, Charles. It seems vulgar to do so at the dinner table.”  
  
          Hendry flushed, his already red face going florid with humiliation and suppressed anger. Charles felt a pang of sympathy for the man, the first of the evening. Hendry might be a blowhard, but it couldn’t be easy for him to be constantly sparring with someone whose prowess at that particular sport so far outstripped his own.  
  
          His final parry delivered, Shaw stood and swept out of the room, leaving his cigar and his half finished drink behind him. The others followed, even Hendry, until Charles was left alone in the room with Hank.  
  
          There was a moment of silence. Hank was blinking rapidly behind his spectacles.  
  
          “What just happened?” he asked finally.  
  
          “When I know,” Charles said, “I’ll be sure to tell you.”  
  
          They left the dining room and trailed into the parlor belatedly behind the other men. Raven shot him a questioning look but he shook his head; he would fill her in later. For the next hour Charles circulated among his guests, answering questions and engaging in small talk, even sitting down briefly to play a hand of cards with Emma Shaw and one of the socialites he had invited. It was a lively company, with the awkwardness of dinner and the men’s after dinner drinks smoothed away, if not forgotten. By the end of the hour, he had received two more promises of donations for the Institute and several more vague promises of future aid. Moira came by at one point to offer him a cup of coffee, which was enough to make him joke in an undertone that _she_ must be the psychic; the warm buzz of the brandy had faded, leaving the start of a headache in its place. She smiled appreciatively, but there was a wrinkle of concern between her brows.  
  
           “What troubles you?” he asked.  
  
          “Shaw seemed terribly pleased with himself when he came out of the dining room, and Hank looks like he’s about to combust.”  
  
          Charles glanced over at Hank, who was deep in conversation with one of the other two doctors Charles had invited. His expression vacillated between excitement and nausea, although he was doing a credible job of nodding along and pretending to listen to whatever his companion was saying. “Poor chap,” Charles murmured.  
 _  
“Charles.”_ She cleared her throat awkwardly. “Mr. Xavier.”  
  
          “Oh, please. I think we’re on good enough terms to use Christian names.” He shook his head, and turned his gaze from Hank back to Moira. He studied her for a moment. During the first few months of their friendship, Charles had very seriously considered falling in love with Moira. She had beauty which rivaled Mrs. Shaw’s, but with a warmth to her that no one could claim that Emma possessed. She was intelligent and brave enough to question social norms, without trampling all over them the way that Raven (and yes, Charles himself) sometimes did. Really, there was no one else Charles could imagine taking as a wife – but the infatuation had waned, as Charles’ infatuations inevitably did. Besides, all of that presumed that Moira would accept a proposal from him, and he rather thought she had more sense than that.  
  
          “You’re woolgathering,” she said, “and you’re not answering my question.”  
  
          “My apologies.” He took another sip from his coffee before placing it on the side table, where it balanced precariously next to one of the enormous pink flower arrangements. “Sebastian Shaw has promised a donation to the Xavier Institute. He hasn’t specified the amount yet, but being as he rarely does _anything_ in a small way I imagine that we can expect the considerable might of the Shaw fortune as a supplement to my own.”  
  
           “How splendid.”  
  
          “Say that again. More convincingly this time, if you would.”  
  
          She smiled and shrugged. “I understand how much easier it will be for the Institute to succeed if we have his support, but you know I don’t much care for the man.”  
 _  
Why?_ Charles wanted to ask. For a moment, he was frustrated with her continued silence on the matter. She wasn’t a telepath; she couldn’t share his reasons for being uneasy around Shaw. But she wouldn’t say, and he wouldn’t force it from her. Not yet. He didn’t doubt that he could and would trespass against a friend’s wishes if the situation were particularly dire, but Shaw’s interest in the Institute didn’t rank highly enough for that.  
  
          “Someday,” he said, “I will know all your secrets, Moira.”  
  
          He’d meant it as a joke, and she smiled, but neither came across very well.  
  
          “Undoubtedly,” she said, “but not today.” She excused herself then and went to rescue Hank, leaving both Charles mildly annoyed with her and concerned that he had managed to offend a woman for the second time that day.  
  
          He spoke to a few more people before Raven came to stand by his elbow. “Doctor Garrett Anderson would like to speak with you, if you have a moment.”  
  
          Charles tried not to grin. “I have all the moments that she could ever wish to receive.” Raven rolled her eyes, but took him by the arm and led him over to the couch where she had been locked in quiet conversation with the doctor and the doctor’s husband for the better part of the hour Charles had spent circulating among his guests.  
  
          Most people, if asked, would have assumed that Shaw was the guest of honor this evening. They would have been wrong, although Charles never would have risked offending the man by saying so. No, the _real_ guest of honor, in Charles’ mind at least, was the stocky woman of middle years sitting calmly on one of the parlor’s couches and sipping tea, her husband beside her.  
  
           Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had been the first lady physician and surgeon in both England and France, and was currently the only female doctor recognized by the British Medical Association. She had started a school of medicine for women, and a charity hospital that catered to the same. For several years, she had been a member of London’s recently formed Board of Education, although she had since resigned. It was this dual interest in medicine and education that had led Charles to seek her out as a possible resource for the Xavier Institute. He had spent _months_ trying to drum up an introduction, and had been almost unbearable grateful that, unlike so many of the British elite, he had never felt a need to limit his acquaintance to his own kind; among his friends he counted at least a few who had thought it perfectly acceptable to introduce the son of a viscount to the middle-class wife of a steamship company’s owner.  
  
           This, _this_ was why Charles had come to believe that the superiority of the peerage was a sad little pipe dream: people like Armando, with extra-human abilities that could easily match his own, and people like Garrett Anderson, who had achieved as much as he had and done so with so much less to work with.  
  
           “The good doctor has been trying to convince me to join the cause of women’s suffrage,” Raven said, and from the gleam in her eye she was trying to provoke him.  
  
          And – it wouldn’t help Raven’s chances at settling well, but Charles was also a little too aware of their earlier disagreement to walk into that trap. “Splendid,” he said mildly. “Would you like me to attend meetings with you? I’m sure I would find it incredibly educational.”  
  
          The look of muted pleasure on Raven’s face was almost worth the trouble it would take to undo the damage to her reputation that becoming a suffragist might cause. “Well, perhaps I should confine myself to tackling one social injustice at a time,” she allowed. “The Institute keeps me busy enough without adding meetings or pickets to my agenda.”  
  
          “Very pragmatic of you,” Garrett Anderson said, and when Charles skimmed over her mind he found only amused tolerance and quiet approval. At least he had avoided giving offense to a _third_ woman with his flippant remarks. “That’s part of the reason I haven’t been more involved, although I would like to be in the future. I prefer to cause one controversy at a time.”  
  
           “But you cause such delightful controversies,” Charles said, and was rewarded by the laughter of both women. James Anderson smiled, but Charles could sense the disquiet in his mind – something to do with finances, and his marriage to the doctor. They had fought recently, although he wouldn’t have guessed that to be the case from the way the man unconsciously angled his body toward his wife on the couch they shared.  
  
          Garrett Anderson distracted Charles before he could dig any further. “Your sister has been telling me about your wonderful new project, Mr. Xavier. I must say, I’m impressed by how directly involved you’ve been. Generosity is certainly not unheard of among men in your position, but it’s a rare one who doesn’t simply hand off oversight of his giving to an advisor or underling and leave it at that.”  
  
          “Charles has been gifted with a great deal of natural empathy,” Raven murmured, as Charles sought for an appropriate response that didn’t include ‘direct involvement becomes somewhat more of a necessity when one is actually capable of literally feeling the pain of others.’ He shot his sister a appreciative look, and she smiled in acknowledgement.  
  
          “Your brother has much to recommend him, that included,” Garrett Anderson said kindly, and much to his horror Charles found himself blushing. “I hope I’m not being too forward in saying so, but I – and others – have wondered over these past few months why, if you desire to remedy social ills, you’ve been so reluctant to take up your seat in Parliament.”  
  
          This time Raven was silent, and Charles was left to scramble on his own for a believable answer that also wouldn’t horrify the doctor. The truth was, he didn’t take the seat that was hereditarily his because he didn’t trust himself to do so. Charles had the power to change peoples’ minds for them. He wasn’t entirely certain that he would refrain from using that power if he had to spend days on end listening to stubborn old men with more money than compassion table or ignore issues that would relieve the suffering of England’s most vulnerable populations. If he had to listen to the buzz of their thoughts, smug in their own success and unable or unwilling to allow others even the chance of achieving that same level of success, lest their own larders be a little less full with the fat of the land. It was bad enough that he had to do so at dinner parties or in the reading room at the gentlemen’s club where he kept up a cursory membership; anything more, and Charles wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t give into the temptation to turn into a petty dictator in the name of the greater good.  
  
          He couldn’t do that, couldn’t allow himself to _become_ a well-meaning monster who was so convinced he was in the right that he removed free will from the human equation. For small things, like keeping Raven or the Institute safe – yes. But not to rule a room of Britain’s finest, and through them the nation. Beyond even those concerns, if extra-humans were to somehow one day be revealed to the general public (and he hoped that day came, in a better future where the public could be trusted to accept difference as easily as it did homogeny) and he with them, he didn’t want to be the bad example smeared across the very word ‘extra-human,’ the reason they couldn’t be trusted or the reason the power they possessed was to be feared; if he took a position where he could shape policy, he didn’t want to one day be the question mark hovering over every one of those policies, the cause of doubt for every step forward the British government took because even if he never gave into the urge to use his powers to push things forward it would one day be know that it was _possible_ for him to have done so.  
  
           “I _have_ been too forward,” Garrett Anderson decided as the silence stretched and became uncomfortable. “Forgive me. Let us turn back to the more immediate subject of the Xavier Institute – although I trust you won’t mind if I say that I hope you one day reconsider your aversion to a career in politics, whatever the cause may be. This country needs more men who see the importance of educating the poor, and who don’t tremble at the thought of going to suffrage meetings with their sisters.”  
  
           Charles nodded, accepting both the apology and the compliment.  
  
          “You’ll need a doctor, of course,” Garrett Anderson said.  
  
          Raven bristled. “We _have_ a doctor,” she said, and Charles almost smiled to see how offended she was on Hank’s behalf. “A very good one.”  
  
           “Wait, Raven, she has a point,” Charles said. “You know that no one appreciates Hank’s genius more than I, but he can’t man the Institute’s clinic all on his own, day and night.”  
  
          “He looks worn to the bone,” Garrett Anderson said frankly. Charles knew without looking that she was right; he and Hank alternated nights at the Institute, but Charles wasn’t qualified as a doctor and middle-of-the-night medical emergencies had once or twice roused the Hank from bed. Once, a week earlier, Hank had arrived in Darwin’s cab several hours after midnight still in his pajamas, and fallen asleep on the operating table inside their small surgery as soon as the patient had been seen to. He had endurance that honestly made Charles a bit envious, possibly as a side benefit of his extra-human characteristics, but even Hank couldn’t keep up at this pace indefinitely.  
  
          “You were the one who warned me against working my friends to death,” Charles reminded Raven, and she relaxed now that it was evident that no insult to Hank had been intended.  
  
          “A second doctor, and possibly a nurse or two if you really wish to run a functioning clinic,” Garrett Anderson said, tenaciously dragging the conversation back on track. “If you have no objections, I would like to recommend one of the graduates from my school for the position. They’re just as good as their male counterparts and twice as dedicated – they have to be – and it can be hard for a lady physician to find a place in London. Twenty-three years ago I had to open up a practice of my own just to be able to see patients, and most of the hospitals _still_ won’t hire a female doctor.”  
  
           “I have no objections at all,” Charles assured her. “I’ll even trust your discretion when it comes to selecting candidates, although the choice will ultimately belong to Hank. The clinic is more his creature than mine; I mostly see to the running of the Institute as a whole and teach in the school.”  
  
          It would be nice to allow Hank some time to himself, to work as well as to sleep. Every time Charles dragged the man away from his laboratory to see to Institute business he felt certain he was setting the discovery of a vaccine for typhoid or consumption back decades.  
  
          They spoke quietly for a while longer, working out the particulars. The hour was quite late when guests began to drift toward the door, with a kind word or thanks for an evening well spent or, in Shaw’s case, a cheque and a too-hearty handshake that Charles rather wished he had been able to politely avoid.  
  
          Charles sent himself up to bed shortly after Moira had departed and a yawning Hank had been nagged into accepting one of the guest bedrooms for the night. “I need to get an early start,” he explained to Raven. “I don’t like that we had to close the Institute for the evening to make tonight’s party happen, and our new porter is likely used to keeping dock hours. I’ll have to get there early if I don’t wish to keep him waiting.”  
  
          The possibility that Erik _wouldn’t_ be waiting was one that Charles refused to entertain.  
  
           Dawn was just cresting over the streets and buildings of Whitechapel when Charles had his driver (his own driver, and his own carriage, because his having to be up at this hour didn’t necessitate Darwin also suffering a predawn awakening) drop him at the front doors of the Xavier Institute.  
  
          Erik was already waiting, a cigarette hanging between his fingers and his shoulders propped casually against the wall beside the door. Charles was reminded forcibly of the last time he had found Erik standing like this, although this time Erik’s thoughts were relaxed and still a little drowsy with sleep rather than buzzing with the confused jumble of anger and carefully restrained violence.  
  
          Charles took a moment to enjoy the hushed murmur of the other man’s half-formed morning thoughts, and relished the fact that for once he was not an uninvited guest in someone else’s home; with Erik, he had permission to enter, although he did see it as courtesy to knock first: he saw Erik straighten away from the wall when he felt the first tentative brush of Charles’ mind against his own. Charles was usually more subtle with the use of his powers, but he _wanted_ Erik to know he was there, to have a chance to tidy up and prepare to welcome another person inside.  
  
           The vague, acknowledging noise that Erik used to verbalize that welcome was possibly the sweetest sound Charles had ever heard.  
  
          “Hello, my friend,” he said. “I’m so glad that you’ve decided to join me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a question. Did I just accidentally write historical RPF?
> 
> Big, huge thanks to everyone who's commented/kudos'ed/bookmarked; you have no idea how unbelievably happy you've made me. ~~Sometimes, I sit up late at night and coo at my hit counter, and tell it it's pretty.~~
> 
> Special thanks to JaeFire, who is as of this chapter keeping me from making ALL THE TYPOS.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel a bit odd warning for something I don't discuss in depth in the story, but I'm going to ere on the side of caution here. Don't Google Emma Smith if you're triggered by descriptions of violence, particularly rape or other violence against women. I'll provide a small footnote at the end of this chapter for anyone who wants to know who she was for context without dealing with the details of her death. There _is_ a murder in this chapter and, while I don't go too far into the gore, I should probably warn for that too. I know violence seems like kind of a gimme in a fic that includes Jack the Ripper, but I really don't want anyone to accidentally stumble on something they would find unpleasant.

_August 31_ st _, 1888_  
  
          Erik watched as Xavier shuffled up the steps of the Institute and fumbled with the lock on the door. Dawn hadn’t yet broken, and the man was obviously still half in bed; the key seemed to be giving him some difficulties. Erik lifted a hand and twisted it through the air, and heard the quiet click of tumblers sliding into place. The key turned on its own beneath Xavier’s fingers.  
  
           He – well, maybe he wanted to show off. Just a little. He used his powers to help him with daily tasks, but since his mother’s death there had been no one he could allow to see him use them, much less an spectator as appreciative as Xavier seemed to be.  
  
           “Marvelous,” Xavier said, turning to smile at Erik. “Simply marvelous.”  
  
           He might have said more, but they were interrupted. “Mr. Lehnsherr!” Erik turned, scanning the sparse early morning crowds for whomever had called his name. He wondered briefly if any of them had seen his parlor trick with the key, but Xavier’s body would have blocked the door from view and besides, anyone out this early in the morning was undoubtedly still fogged with sleep or drink.  
  
           There. The red shawl, bright enough he could make out its color even in the pale predawn light, was instantly recognizable, as was the woman wearing it. His shoulders relaxed, and he lifted a hand to acknowledge Mary Kelly’s greeting. She apparently took his acknowledgement as permission to approach, and he didn’t protest. He didn’t mind Kelly. Her man occasionally worked the docks, and she would sometimes come to meet him at the end of the day or when the men took a break at midday. Erik hadn’t seen her or her man for some time, but that wasn’t strange; if a fellow could find work more reliable than the docks, he took it.  
  
           Which was why Erik was on Xavier’s doorstep, really. There was no sense in not taking a good position, he told himself, just because it smacked of charity and injured his pride.  
  
           Xavier made a quiet, annoyed noise. Undoubtedly he had caught the tenor of Erik’s thoughts. Erik just arched a brow and pointedly turned his attention back to Kelly.  
  
           Something wasn’t right. Kelly’s shoulders were hunched beneath her bright shawl and her hands were balled in her apron, mussing the fabric that Erik knew she worked hard to keep such a starched and spotless white that it wouldn’t have shamed a fine lady’s maid to wear. She was tall for a woman, easily Xavier’s height and stoutly built, and Erik didn’t think that he had ever seen her stand anything but straight and confident, like she was defying people to  _dare_  think ill of her poverty or her history.  
  
           In general, Erik rather approved.  
  
           Her pretty face was furrowed with concern, and she leaned in too close to him in a way that spoke more of a desire for comfort than of coquettishness. “Have you heard?”  
  
           Erik thought about the wisdom of encouraging her to continue, but the look she wore was worry, and not the delight she might feel in a particularly juicy bit of gossip. “No,” he said. “Heard what?”  
  
           “Another woman killed,” Kelly said, and shuddered delicately. “Over Buck’s Row.  _Murdered_ .”  
  
           He felt more than saw Xavier lean forward at his back, suddenly curious. It was good that Xavier was curious, because Erik wasn’t really. Kelly continued, either not noticing or not caring about the varied response she was getting from her audience. “First Emma Smith, then that woman they found in George Yard, and now this. I tell you, it’s enough to make a girl feel unsafe walking the streets.”  
  
           “Why  _are_  you on the streets, then?” Erik asked pointedly.  
  
           Some of the nervousness faded from Kelly’s face, and her expression turned mulish. “I’ve got to make my doss money somehow, haven’t I?” Then: “Don’t you go judging me, Erik Lehnsherr.”  
  
           “I wasn’t,” Erik said, and it was mostly true. He had more important things to concern himself with than how Kelly made her living. “How does your Joseph feel about that?”  
  
           She winced, and for a moment her expression crumpled like she might cry. Erik felt a little guilty, and more than a little unnerved. Kelly had never struck him as a particularly weepy kind of female, and he wasn’t very well equipped to deal with a crying woman. “We quarreled,” she said. Erik shot Xavier a look, and the one he received in return was distinctly reproachful. Apparently Xavier didn’t approve of him possibly making women cry.  
  
           “There, there,” Erik said awkwardly. He considered patting her on the shoulder, but thought that he might just be encouraging tears by doing so. “There,” he added for good measure. “I’m sure you two will patch things up in no time.”  
  
           He had no idea why he was standing there listening to Kelly’s domestic troubles, other than that she was a good enough sort and the look on Xavier’s face was a lot more favorable now.  
  
           “Not any time soon,” Kelly said, and he was relieved to see some of her usual steely resolve in her eyes instead of tears. “It isn’t my fault that he lost his place, and  _he’s_  not about to take to the streets to keep a roof over our heads.” She paused, and added, “He’s left me over it,” a little more quietly.  
  
           “I’m sorry,” Xavier said, and he sounded startlingly sincere. Kelly glanced up at where he was standing on the Institute’s stoop, but seemed neither alarmed nor annoyed by a stranger’s having heard her business.  
  
           “Hardly your doing, sir,” she said absently. Erik watched as she swept a glance over Xavier, and saw avarice creep into her gaze as she took in the dark blue waistcoat and jacket that had undoubtedly been tailor made to fit the man, and the flawlessly polished black shoes, the price of which would have probably kept either one of them in doss money for a year. Worry smoothed away from her face and left a practiced, sultry smile on her lips. “Who’s your friend, Mr. Lehnsherr?”  
  
           “Charles Xavier,” Xavier told her.  
  
           “And he’s not interested,” Erik said flatly, and ignored both the indignant look that Kelly shot him and the possibility that Xavier might very well be interested in what Kelly was willing to sell.  
 _  
There are two things that I have never paid for, my friend,_  Xavier’s voice said in Erik’s head,  _and air is one of them. Still, there is no call for you to be rude. I’m sure that Miss Kelly is a very nice girl, and that if I did accept her offer it would be magical.  
_ _  
_ Erik snorted softly. A four penny knee trembler could be called many things, but magical wasn’t one of them. For that matter, Kelly was many things, but a nice girl wasn’t them.  
 _  
‘Nice’ and ‘prostitute’ aren’t mutually exclusive, Erik. Really. I’m surprised at you.  
_ _  
_ He shrugged a shoulder. He couldn’t disagree, because by East End standards Mary Kelly really was very nice. She was certainly a lot nicer than Erik, at least when she wasn’t in drink. That didn’t mean she was anything like the kind of women that men like Xavier invited around for tea.  
  
           “Would you like a cup of tea, Miss Kelly?” Xavier said, with vicious sweetness that Erik felt certain was directed at him and not Kelly. She didn’t seem to notice that she hadn’t introduced herself, but of course she wouldn’t; Kelly had no idea that Xavier had ways of learning her name other than her offering it. “You must be dreadfully frightened by this new murder, and I’m sure you could use a chance to warm up before getting yourself home.” He smiled winningly at her. “I can get a nice fire going for us.”  
  
           Erik wondered if Xavier had ever lit a fire on his own in his life.  
 _  
I’m not completely useless. I can brew my own tea too.  
_ _  
_ Xavier was starting to sound a little peevish, but Erik was of the mind that the other man could just as easily stop peeping at the thoughts of others if he didn’t like what he saw there.  
 _  
Touché.  
_ _  
_ Erik smiled a little, and the obvious pleasure on Kelly’s face at the invitation was almost enough to make him soften. It was – kind – of Xavier to treat the women of this neighborhood with the same courtesy that he would show his wife or the other women of quality he knew, and Erik couldn’t quite shake the impression that Xavier would be extending the invitation even if he  _hadn’t_  been feeling the need to show up Erik.  
 _  
Why shouldn’t I?_  The wry note to the question made it clear that Xavier was entirely aware of all the arguments someone might put forth as to why a woman like Kelly was undeserving of polite offers of tea, and simply found them insufficient.  _And I’m not wed. Wherever did you get that idea?  
_ _  
_ He wasn’t sure how to answer; so far Xavier had just been picking up on Erik’s thoughts and responding to them. He thought as hard as he could about the lovely fair-haired girl he had seen Xavier with that first day.  
 _  
My sister. I expect you’ll have the opportunity to meet her later today.  
_ _  
_ Kelly was speaking, and with some effort Erik forced himself to focus on the conversation that was actually happening rather than the one in his head. “That’s right decent of you, sir, but I’m afraid I must be getting home.” Her smile was sweeter now, but in spite of her words she seemed reluctant to leave.  
  
           The murder must have frightened her, Xavier had said. “I’ll see you there,” Erik said, surprising himself as much as Kelly. Xavier turned brilliant blue eyes toward him and practically  _beamed_  in his direction, and Erik tried to ignore the quiet pleasure that the man’s approval stirred. “That is, if my new employer can spare me,” he added stiffly.  
  
           “Oh, certainly,” Xavier said.  
  
           Kelly seemed to have overcome her initial surprise, but still she hesitated a moment before nodding. “I would like that, Mr. Lehnsherr. Thank you.”  
  
           She led Erik toward her home, taking a more roundabout route than he would have chosen. It wasn’t until they had passed the Royal London Hospital and he saw the pale spire of the church for which Whitechapel was named that he realized her goal was Buck’s Row.  
  
           “I don’t believe I agreed to accompany you to gawk,” Erik said, and Kelly shrugged.  
  
           A crowd had already congregated around the murder scene. Police and a man who was undoubtedly a doctor, but even this early in the morning there was a small flock of spectators. Kelly slowed as they approached, and Erik was forced to shorten his stride to match hers or go on without her. He was very tempted to leave her, but walking on seemed counterproductive to his purpose of seeing her home.  
  
           A black bonnet on the ground. A few inches from the bonnet lay the woman. Even in the pale gray light of oncoming morning, Erik could see the ruin that had been made of her throat.  
  
           Blood on the cobbles.  
  
           He stumbled, and Kelly reached out to steady him, her expression anxious. “Erik?”  
  
           He allowed her hand on his arm, and turned his face away from the swarm of constables and the woman on the ground. Blood on the cobbles. It had been so much easier not to be bothered by that before seeing her, before realizing that that this woman very probably someone’s wife, someone’s sister.  
  
           Someone’s mother.  
  
           “Fine,” he said curtly. “Let’s go.”  
  
           Kelly didn’t protest, and she didn’t take her hand from his arm as they walked the rest of the way down Buck’s Row and into the rabbit’s warren of surrounding streets. “Did you know her?” he asked, mostly to distract Kelly from his truly disgraceful loss of composure.  
  
           “We don’t  _all_  know each other, Mr. Lehnsherr,” Kelly said tartly. She sighed. “I’ve seen her around. Her name is Polly. Maybe. She might be no more a Polly than I am a Ginger or a Marie Jeanette.” He glanced at her and found a thin smile turning up the corners of her mouth, a bit forced but also holding the smallest hint of wicked humor.  
  
           “Ginger doesn’t much suit you,” he said with a pointed glance at her pale blond locks, because Erik wasn’t much for unnecessary chatter but they both needed a diversion from the scene they had left behind them.  
  
           They walked the rest of the way in silence, through streets that seemed still and hushed even though traffic had begun to pick up with the approach of true daylight. When they reached the one room lodging at Miller’s Court that Kelly had, until recently, shared with Joseph Barnett, she pushed open the door. She paused before going inside. “I’ve a dram of gin and some of Joe’s ginger beer, if you’d like.” When he hesitated, she shook her head. “Just a friendly drink, Erik. I’m not offering more, and I doubt you’d accept if I did.” She swept a glance over him and smirked. “Although if I ever do offer, I won’t be charging you for the pleasure.”  
  
           That surprised a smile from Erik, but he shook his head. “No. Thank you, Miss Kelly. I have a job to be getting back to,” His smile twisted into a smirk to match hers. “Wouldn’t do for me to keep Mr. Xavier waiting.”  
  
           “He’s all right, that one. A bit queer in the upper story if I’m to judge, but all right,” Kelly said, which was the closest any of the upper class would get to a glowing recommendation in Whitechapel. She reached out and patted his cheek before stepping inside. “Take care of yourself.” She closed the door and Erik returned to the Institute, taking a more direct route this time.  
  
           The gas lamps at the Institute had been lit and there was a fire burning off the worst of the chill in what Erik assumed was the schoolroom, given the desks and the large slate that dominated one wall. He found Xavier in an office near the back of the first story, his hands buried wrist deep in papers and books and a pot of tea at his elbow. “Have a seat,” he said, glancing up only briefly. “It’s, what, half six now? We still have at least a quarter hour until the others arrive, and over an hour until the children get here.”  
  
           “The others?”  
  
           “The rest of the – staff, I suppose you could call them, although really they cofounded the Institute with me. There’s my sister, Raven, and Miss MacTaggert. They both help me with the teaching. Then there’s Doctor McCoy, who sees to the clinic, and Darwin, who ferries us between the Institute and our respective homes in addition to making his living as a cab driver.”  
  
           “How many of them are like us?”  
  
           “Extra-human?”  
  
           Erik turned the phrase over in his head, and decided he rather liked it. Human, but something more. Possibly something outside of the spectrum of humanity entirely. “Yes.”  
  
           “All, with the exception of Miss MacTaggert.”  
  
           “They were there the night—.”  
  
           “That you threatened my safety should I trouble any of the neighborhood children, yes,” Xavier finished, with more good cheer than Erik thought the reminiscence really deserved. “No need to concern yourself, my friend. That’s all in the past, and you had your reasons I’m sure. I suppose dealing with menacing persons who arrive on our doorstep will now be your domain, as our new porter.”  
  
           “I can do that,” Erik said, and offered his most intimidating smile. Xavier looked rather charmed, which was not the intended response, so Erik frowned instead. “Had a lot of problems with menacing persons, have you?” He wasn’t terrible surprised. The reputation that the East End had for being a rough, dangerous place to live wasn’t unearned.  
  
           “Oh, some,” Xavier said with a shrug. “Nothing I couldn’t handle, but I’m sure your methods will work just as well. Local thugs and the like, sadly convinced that I owe them money in exchange for both the Institute and myself remaining structurally sound.”  
  
           Erik grunted. “Most of the district figures the gangs are the ones that have been killing these women – Smith, and Tabram, and probably this morning’s victim – and for much the same reason. They’ll offer protection, and if the women can’t pay and don’t already have a protector looking after them,” and taking whatever pittance they earned selling themselves on the streets, “the gangs will rough them up. Maybe rough them up a bit too much, or maybe kill them to avoid leaving a witness or to send a message to the rest.”  
  
           Xavier looked horrified, but also not surprised. “That’s despicable.”  
  
           “That’s life,” Erik said flatly, and not at all because the look of dismay on Xavier’s face bothered him. “If you think you can change it, you’re either naïve or arrogant.” He considered Xavier and smirked. “Possibly both.”  
  
           “Think what you like,” Xavier said quietly. “Think me naïve, or an innocent, or a fool. The truth is, my own unique talents have left me more-or-less incapable of being any of those things.” Erik shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and Xavier smiled again, although this one wasn’t quite so real as the others he had so far offered Erik, starched stiff along the edges. “My arrogance, however, I will perhaps own.”  
  
           Erik didn’t smile in response. He knew he should apologize, but he  _hated_  apologizing. On the other hand, Xavier was his employer now. He opened his mouth to speak.  
  
           “That won’t be necessary,” Xavier said. The smile relaxed a touch. “We don’t stand on ceremony here, and I’d rather you not discomfit yourself. You were speaking your mind. I’d be an absolutely horrid teacher if I discouraged that.”  
  
           “I’m not your student,” Erik said stonily.  
  
           “Nor are you entirely my employee,” Xavier said with a shrug, and continued before Erik could protest. “We share a very special gift, Erik. Those of us with extra-human abilities aren’t exactly thick on the ground, and I’d hate to lose the chance for us and those like us to befriend and support each other simply because of perceived differences in status. I will pay you for your services because the Institute needs and porter and you need a job. However, I would very much like it if you would think of our arrangement as working with me, rather than for me. I hope we can be colleagues, perhaps even friends, as I am with all the others who have joined me in creating the Institute.”  
  
           That was very easy for Xavier to say. He had all the benefits of class and wealth in his favor; he could afford to be liberal in how he approached his employees. It was much more difficult for Erik to believe Xavier’s words, when he was the one who would be without a way to earn his bread if he treated Xavier cavalierly and Xavier ended up taking exception. Behaving as if the man who paid his bills was an equal, never mind a  _friend_ , was a tightrope that Erik wasn’t sure he wanted to walk.  
  
           “You don’t trust my word,” Xavier said, but he sounded more resigned than angry. “I asked you to give me a chance to prove to you that you’re not alone, that there are people you can rely on. How about – a trial period? Six weeks, let’s say. If, at the end of that time, we find that we have irreconcilable differences, we can part ways amiably and I will  _promise_  to give you a character good enough to find you a place nearly anywhere you would wish, no matter on what terms you leave us.”  
  
           “Or on what terms you decide to dismiss me.”  
  
           Xavier sighed. “Yes. Should I suffer traumatic brain injury in the next six weeks and decide that the help has become too uppity, I will manfully overcome my wounded pride and give you a good character in spite of the fact that you are obviously unfit to perform even the most menial of tasks. Does that satisfy you?”  
  
           Xavier sounded so  _beleaguered_  by the forced concession that Erik couldn’t help but smile, just a little. He still couldn’t quite believe that Xavier’s goodwill would last but, “Yes. That satisfies me.”  
  
           Besides, it wasn’t like the man wouldn’t hear every impertinent thought that went through Erik’s head, even if Erik didn’t consent to speak his mind.  
  
           “That’s very true,” Xavier said agreeably.  
  
           With the terms of Erik’s employment mostly settled, Xavier turned back to discussing the Institute. “I hope to hire on another doctor soon, and maybe a nurse and a girl to do some of the cooking and cleaning. A second porter would be nice as well. Until then, we’re a bit short handed. I wasn’t lying when I said that I wouldn’t be offering you charity. You’ll work, and work hard. Until we can fill in the gaps in our staffing, I’m afraid that you’ll be more of a man-of-all-work than a true porter.”  
  
           “I’m used to hard work,” Erik said with a shrug.  
  
           The work  _was_  hard. Over the next few days, Erik not only took care of the porter’s normal duties of watching the doors and unloading any deliveries made to the Institute, but occasionally lent a hand in the kitchen or with the cleaning as well, especially since MacTaggert seemed to be the only one not woefully unsuited to keeping house.  
  
           MacTaggert was an odd one. Erik had been tempted to brush her off as another upper-middle class woman with more hair than sense at first, but even brief exposure had dissuaded him of the notion. She spoke carefully (unlike either of the Xavier siblings) and there was a sense of contained energy to her that made Erik wary. It was ridiculous to imagine of a woman bound tight by stays and heavy skirts and decorum, but Erik couldn’t help but regard her the same way he did the big cats he had once seen at the zoo in Regent’s Park – too well-fed or too well-caged to be truly dangerous, eyes heavy and sharp claws artfully sheathed, but with the potential for ferocity still unmistakably there. Her dark eyes were watchful, and he didn’t get the impression that she missed much.  
  
           Early in his tenure at the Institute, she had sought him out while he had been eating dinner in the kitchen. She had sidled up to the table and leaned in close, as if she was avoiding being heard, even though no one else had been present.  
  
           “Hello,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Moira MacTaggert. I work in the school.”  
  
           Erik nodded.  
  
           “I was there the night that you met Charles,” she said, in a voice so carefully devoid of tone that the fine hairs on the back of Erik’s neck stood up. “When you threatened him. I do hope we won’t have a repeat of that little performance.”  
  
           “I don’t plan on it,” Erik managed, after taking a moment to clear both his throat and his surprise at her addressing the subject so directly. “I’ve... had a chance of opinion about the Institute’s goals. I won’t bother Xavier again.”  
  
           “See that you don’t,” MacTaggert said, “or no one will ever think to ask, ‘whatever happened to Erik Lehnsherr?’”  
  
           She had turned and left before Erik could decide whether to be angered or alarmed by the implied threat. He still wasn’t sure how seriously he should take her. She didn’t look like much – but there was the buzz of his instincts telling him that this was not a person to be trifled with, and rich women had connections that the likes of him had no way of anticipating.  
  
           He avoided her as much as possible after that.  
  
           ‘As much as possible’ turned out to be not very much at all, since the Institute wasn’t particularly large or particularly crowded, and since Erik’s duties as porter just as often involved not only keeping people out but keeping the children in, when they would have rather tested the bounds of Xavier’s tolerance (as they never would have tested the tempers of their employers at the factories) by wandering away from their lessons. By the end of his first week there, however, they had settled in to the new routine and had stopped taxing Erik’s patience, because even if this was a different kind of work than they were accustomed to, the children of London’s poor were used to work.  
  
           The four Leibowitz children, after they arrived on the second day of Erik’s employment, never strayed from the schoolroom. Perhaps it was only because they knew better than to trifle with Erik, or perhaps it was because  _their_  mama had raised them better than that, but he was obscurely proud of them for their diligence.  
  
           The children were not the only ones that Erik ended up intercepting. Doctor McCoy’s patients had once or twice tried to abscond with the Institute’s silverware or other small valuables, and Erik had been forced to relieve them of their ill-gotten gains on the way out the door. The third or fourth time he had pulled a few spare spoons or Xavier’s watch from someone’s shawl or coat pockets, he had sought out the doctor in the infirmary.  
  
           “ _Herr Doktor_ ,” he said severely, weaving through the two rows of beds, with their spotlessly clean sheets, that dominated the narrow room. The clinic always smelled faintly of lye and less pleasant things, and Erik steered clear of it for the most part; McCoy was choosy enough about keeping things clean that he did it himself rather than enlisting Erik’s help. Erik came to a stop in front of McCoy, ignoring the gray faced woman the physician was conversing with, other than to spare her a quick glance and make sure she was holding only a fistful of pills and not the pearls MacTaggert had worn to the Institute that day. “ _Herr Doktor_ , you can’t let them wander. Their fingers get greedy.”  
  
           McCoy looked at him, his usually mild features briefly transformed by irritation. “Are you a trained nurse? Can you help me look after the patients well enough that I can both treat them and account for their movements around the Institute? No? Then I don’t want to hear it.”  
  
           Erik was taken aback. McCoy had always seemed rather nervous around him, and he had been under the impression that the doctor would have difficulty saying ‘boo’ to a mouse. He had been expecting quick acquiescence and perhaps an apology, not dismissal and the peeved man that stood before him, strangely competent in his own element. He remained silent as McCoy finished dealing with his patient and sent the woman, who had been a tenant of one of those neat little infirmary beds for several days, on her way.  
  
           “Opium?” he asked once McCoy had finished and the woman had departed, her shoulders hunched in her long black coat and the pills and bottle of medicine McCoy had given her clutched in her hands.  
  
           “Are you questioning my treatment?” McCoy waved off any response Erik might have given a moment later and sighed with obvious frustration. “She’s been beaten within the last few days – although she won’t say by whom – and she’s got the White Plague. There’s very little I can do for her, other than give her something for the pain and a few days of rest here. Villemin and Koch have made some startling advancements in how we understand the disease, but a cure is still a long way off. If you have any suggestions, I’d be  _delighted_  to hear them.”  
  
           “I was merely asking,” Erik said as placidly as he could manage when confronted not only with clear evidence of a backbone but actual sarcasm, his own temper starting to curl at the base of his spine, and excused himself before he could say or do something that might be regrettable to his state of employment. Xavier was waiting by the door, and Erik narrowed his eyes in anticipation of a scolding for troubling the doctor.  
  
           “Don’t mind him,” Xavier murmured. “Hank is always a little prickly on Thursdays.”  
  
           “What happens on Thursdays?”  
  
           Xavier made a soft, considering noise. “Hank consults with Doctor Treves at London Hospital and spends an hour with Joseph Merrick.”  
  
           Erik was silent for a moment. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t see the significance,” he said, once it became clear that Xavier wasn’t going to explain.  
  
           “Merrick is a resident at the hospital,” Xavier replied. “He’s – his deformities are extensive. He spent a while as a curiosity before Doctor Treves took him as a patient. You may know him better as ‘The Elephant Man.’ When I first heard of him, I thought it possible that he was another extra-human, since both Raven and Hank show certain physical peculiarities as a result of their evolution. Unfortunately, Mr. Merrick was not so lucky as them. He is merely deformed, without any of the extra-human gifts we have been so blessed as to receive.”  
  
           “Why does McCoy continue to visit him, in that case?”  
  
           Xavier cast him an opaque look. “I can’t say for certain, of course—.”  
  
           “Don’t insult my intelligence, Xavier.”  
  
           “Fine. I  _won’t_  say for certain, since it’s Hank’s business and none of ours, but I believe he is concerned that the physical evidence of his evolved state – his feet, as of right now – will progressively become more distinct as time wears on, as Merrick’s deformities have become more severe over the years. Hank has never been particularly comfortable with his evolutionary quirks, and I believe his visits to Merrick have become... I don’t know. Penance, perhaps, or proof that a man too strange to the eye to function in normal society can still survive and find a place to belong. Merrick is very intelligent, I understand. He’s even been visited by the Prince and Princess of Wales.”  
  
           Erik snorted. “And yet he’s kept in a hospital and managed by a doctor. Is that the kind of existence McCoy looks forward to, should his more abnormal traits be discovered? Being reduced to some kind of – some kind of  _experiment_ ?” He shook his head. “Don’t fool yourself, Xavier. There’s no place in society for us other than as curiosities or pets. Were the world to find out about us tomorrow, we would be offered no acceptance other than, perhaps, the carefully monitored life that your Elephant Man leads. Don’t pretend that Merrick won’t be much more valued by his doctor friend as a specimen on a slab after his death than he ever was as a living, intelligent man. Don’t pretend that anyone would feel differently about us, were they to learn what we can do.”  
  
           “Perhaps,” Xavier murmured, “but I choose to believe that someday, the world will open up enough for true acceptance to be possible. Progress marches on, my friend, and one day extra-humans will live in a time when we can reveal ourselves without fear of reprisal.”  
  
           A shake of the head was the answer Xavier received. “People spit at me on the street because I’m a Jew,” Erik said flatly. “I can’t picture a future where the knowledge that I can shift and shape metal with my mind is greeted with anything but fear.”  
  
           Xavier was silent for a moment. Erik glanced at him, concerned that he had offended the man, but Xavier’s face was thoughtful and maybe a little troubled. “You’re entitled to your opinion, and no one knows better than I do what small-minded hatred people are capable of, so I can hardly say that your concerns are baseless. I believe that more often than not, however, history moves toward acceptance rather than toward exclusion, no matter how slowly that movement occurs. Two hundred years ago, being a Catholic or a Jew would have excluded you from many professions. Now we’ve had a Prime Minister of Jewish birth. Perhaps in another hundred years, there will be openly extra-human MPs. We may not live to see it, Erik, but it will happen, and it may happen in part because people like you and me have left an imprint on history more positive than not, something that people can point to and say, ‘but see, the powers that they have been gifted with can be used for good as well as for ill.’”  
  
           “A hundred years is a long time,” Erik said. “Maybe you’re right, but I don’t feel that I should excuse a society or a nation for how it treats me now because with time, and contingent on my good behavior, it  _might_  someday decide that I have worth equal to that of any other man in spite of what it views as my shortcomings. People should be held accountable for how they behave  _now_ , not whether their descendants will learn to behave better. Maybe you have the luxury of standing on the brink of the millennium and calling the rise to power of a convert progress, but the name ‘Lipski’ is still being shouted and Doctor McCoy will still end up as an experiment or in the morgue should anyone get a good enough look at what he’s hiding inside of his shoes.”  
  
           “You’re thinking that I’m naïve again.” The smile on Xavier’s face was faint but unmistakably there, and Erik was starting to believe that maybe his erstwhile employer had been telling the truth about treating him as an equal. “I would like the opportunity to prove you wrong. Do you play chess?”  
  
           “My father taught me,” Erik said cautiously. “A long time ago. I probably remember the basics.” He remembered everything; his father had been an accomplished chess player, and while many of his memories from before his family had fled Germany were blurry and confused there was a sharpness to the countless evenings he had sat with his father in front of the fireplace (because plentiful firewood and coal and comfortably appointed sitting rooms had not been then the strange and foreign concepts that they were now) and learned how to read, and play chess, and any number of other things.  
  
           He hadn’t thought about his father in some time. Edie Lehnsherr’s death remained a fresh wound. Erik had never been able to confirm with certainly the death of her husband, although so many years missing made it clear to him that Jakob was no longer among the living. He had not been a negligent father or husband; he would have come to them in England had he been able to, or sought Erik out following Edie’s death. The fact that Erik and his mother had used false names upon their arrival (for Erik had been Max after first reaching England’s shores, and very confused by his mother’s insistence that it be so) would not have stopped Jakob, nor would have Erik’s erratic movements in the years that followed.  
  
           So his father was as dead as his mother, and if Erik sometimes had trouble remembering the face that went with the idea of  _mein Vater_ , he did at least have clear memories of nights spent learning to push rooks and bishops around the checkered chessboard.  
  
           Later that night, he had joined Xavier for drinks and a game of chess. Learning that Xavier kept a fine Staunton chess set made of boxwood and ebony at the Institute because the one he had at home was (he apologized) “too nice to travel with” had not surprised Erik; learning that he actually enjoyed spending a few hours playing and conversing with Xavier had. They had repeated the ritual every night since when it had been Xavier and not McCoy spending the night at the Institute, since by the middle of the week Erik had started arriving in the late afternoon and working through to just before dawn, as Xavier had initially suggested he do until a second porter was found, tripping home in the first early light of morning.  
  
           Sometimes they spoke of the progress of history. More often they discussed their days or music or literature, and Charles (because by then Erik had relented, and allowed Xavier to be Charles) had taken to bringing Erik books from his own library after Erik had once confessed that he enjoyed reading but that his three-book collection was woefully inadequate, especially since he now had more time during the daylight hours to read and more money to spend on candles and lamp oil on the rare evenings where he found himself at home. Sometimes Charles spoke of his childhood in the country and London, and occasionally he managed to wring out carefully culled details about Erik’s life with his mother or years of travel. It was the only time that Erik was sure that Charles wasn’t gleaning anything other than what Erik chose to tell him, because telepathy was strictly outlawed during their chess games – it wouldn’t do for Charles to be able to anticipate Erik’s moves before he made them.  
  
           Once or twice, Charles had tried to bring up the recent murders. Erik was rarely cooperative; the only murdered woman he cared about was almost twenty years dead, and he couldn’t help but resent a little the amount of attention that Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols was receiving, when his mother had barely been a footnote in the local papers. Besides, it wasn’t like Charles was short on partners to discuss the murders with. Some days, it seemed that people talked about little else.  
  
           By the time that Erik arrived each afternoon, at least a dozen newspapers had been collected in the public rooms of the Institute. The patients and the children, MacTaggert and Miss Xavier, even Hank McCoy – who rarely seemed to care about current news that didn’t involve medical or scientific advancements – would speak of the most recent developments as revealed by the press, and there was no escaping the discussion at home either. One evening, Erik had returned to the house off of Petticoat Lane to find Alex and Mrs. Leibowitz conversing leisurely with a reporter from the  _Daily News_  on the front stoop, Mrs. Leibowitz’s across-the-landing neighbor (whose name Erik couldn’t remember for the life of him) with them.  
  
           “Thank God I needn’t be out after dark,” Mrs. Leibowitz said, worry tightening the line of her mouth.  
  
           “No more needn’t I,” the neighbor said, “but my two girls have got to come home latish, and I’m all of a fidget until they come.”  
  
           “These gangs,” Mrs. Leibowitz said, shaking her head. “They’ll murder us all. On my word, it might be women on the streets now, but how long before they turn on those of us who keep to our homes?”  
  
           Alex, silent until then, grunted softly. “That’s a yarn,” he said dismissively, and Erik scowled at him for speaking so to Mrs. Leibowitz, no matter that he privately agreed. Alex shrugged unrepentantly and explained to the curious news reporter: “I rather wish it was true. If there was a gang like that, one or another of them would split before long, and it’d all come out.” There was a brief flash of some private unhappiness across the younger man’s face, although Erik was sure that everyone else chalked up Alex’s discontent to the same worry the women felt over the murders. Erik knew better, and made an absent mental note to prod Alex into confessing his troubles sooner rather than later; if they were weighing heavily enough to show, Erik couldn’t ignore the possibility that at some point those troubles would knock on their collective door. “Bet your money this hasn’t been done that way,” Alex finished.  
  
           Erik had been a little amused to see Alex quoted in one of the Institute’s growing collection of newspapers the next day. Alex  _hadn’t_ been amused, but that was what he got for talking to reporters.  
  
           For the most part, Erik tried to ignore the chatter and the newspapers, but since no one else was similarly resolved he couldn’t help but learn more than he wanted.  
  
           “They’re covering the inquest,” Miss Xavier had said with a grimace one afternoon. “The coroner says she was mutilated as well as murdered.” There was nothing of fear on her face, but after all Raven Xavier did not have to spend nights walking unescorted through the streets of Whitechapel. Miss Xavier didn’t seem to fear much of anything, which Erik chose to attribute to the fact that while Charles might not be naïve, the jury was still out on the subject of his sister. Miss Xavier was beautiful, and bored in the way that only a young woman with the entire world open to her and no need to scramble for her daily survival could be bored. Like MacTaggert, Erik had initially been tempted to dismiss her as useless and more than a little spoiled, and while he still thought the later applied, she was also intelligent, as well as having a tendency to bully her brother and a mean sense of humor that Erik couldn’t help but find endlessly entertaining.  
  
           Charles leaned in to read over her shoulder, and sighed. “Yes. If only the papers were as interested in reporting the details of the inquest as they are in telling us what Coroner Baxter was wearing today. I fail to see how his choice of black-and-white checkered trousers and a red scarf are pertinent to the proceedings.”  
  
           “That’s undoubtedly for the benefit of us ladies,” Raven said dryly. “Lord knows we would have no interest in the news were it not for the inclusion of fashion in the day’s accounting.”  
  
           Erik had snorted with amusement, and Raven had looked grimly pleased with herself. She had initially been rather cutting to him – he thought that, like MacTaggert, she resented his early behavior to Charles – but now she seemed to seek his approval as often as she did her brother’s. They had bonded a little over the fact that neither of them were particularly nice, and that both of them occasionally drove Charles to distraction by being complete and utter bastards. Or whatever the well-bred female equivalent of a complete and utter bastard was, in Miss Xavier’s case.  
  
           Toward the end of the week, she had blithely invited him to call her by her Christian name. Charles had looked delighted by this new evidence that Erik was making  _friends_ . McCoy had looked so appalled that Erik had worried the good doctor would pass out from the scandal of it all. Erik had laughed a little at McCoy’s discomfort with Raven’s familiarity, but after Charles’ earlier revelations about the doctor he had also learned how to put hospital corners on a bed, because Erik believed in walking carefully the line between being a complete bastard and becoming a man that his mother would have been ashamed to own.  
  
           Some of the news surrounding the murder was not as easy to laugh off as the attention the press paid to the coroner’s sartorial elegance, however.  
  
           “They’re calling him Leather Apron,” MacTaggert said as that first week wound to a close. There were dark circles beneath her eyes that made Erik wonder idly what she did when she wasn’t at the Institute. Perhaps she had a lover; he understood that even upper class women did that, no matter how carefully their families and society regulated their behavior. A moment later it occurred to him that perhaps if she did, that lover was Charles – they were  _extremely_  comfortable – but he both found it doubtful and was bothered by how distasteful he found the thought, so he did his best to stop wondering about it. It was, after all, none of his business how Charles and MacTaggert conducted themselves away from the Institute, no matter how much Charles wanted to be his friend and equal, and no matter how much Erik was beginning to... value... Charles’ company.  
  
           MacTaggert’s next words drew Erik’s attention away from contemplation of her personal life, although the distraction they presented was not a pleasant one. “Listen to this: ‘The sense of fear which the murder of the unfortunate woman Nichols has thrown over the neighborhood, and especially over her companions, shows no sign of decreasing. A number of the street wanderers are in nightly terror of _Leather Apron_ . One of our reporters visited one of the single women's lodging houses last night. It is in Thrawl Street, one of the darkest and most terrible-looking spots in Whitechapel. The proprietor of the place told some gruesome stories of the man who has now come to be regarded as the terror of the East End. Night after night, he said, women have come in a fainting condition after being knocked about by _Leather Apron_ . This ‘terror,’ he said, would go to a public house or coffee room and peep in through the window to see if a particular woman was there. He would then vanish, lying in wait for his victim at some convenient corner. The police are making efforts to arrest him, but he constantly changes his quarters. The hunt for  _Leather Apron_  began in earnest last evening. Constables 43 and 173, J Division were detailed to accompany Detective Ewright, of the J Division, in a search through all the quarters where the crazy Jew was likely to be. They began at half-past ten in Church Street, rumor having located the suspected man there. They went through lodging houses, into pubs, down side streets, threw their bull's-eyes into every shadow, and searched the quarter thoroughly, but without result.’”  
  
           Erik sat frozen at the kitchen table, where he had been cutting potatoes for the children’s supper. He put down the knife he had been using, because the blade had started to twist toward him and he was angry enough not to care. “They’re saying it’s a Jew,” he said flatly, and he wasn’t even very surprised. There were a few sure things in life that Erik trusted, and he certainly  _trusted_  that the papers and public would cast blame where it would fall most easily, without bothering to back up their accusations with fact, and with no regard for how many lives could be imperiled by another notorious Jewish murderer in the East End.  
  
           Had his mind been clearer, had he been anything less than practically livid with rage and the first faint stirrings of concern, he might have been surprised by the way MacTaggert’s gaze gentled with sympathy as she considered him. “I’m afraid so.” She turned her face away, giving her next words careful consideration. “It’s – irresponsible of them to cast blame so early in the investigation. People are scared. If the public becomes convinced that a Hebrew is the responsible party right now, there will be more blood than Mary Nichols’ in the streets.”  
  
           It was unmistakably a warning. Erik didn’t really need to be warned, but he appreciated it nonetheless, and the evidence that not everyone was inclined to let the sensationalism of the papers sway their reason did a little to calm him. He still didn’t pick up the knife.  
  
           On his way home the next morning someone yelled the name of Leather Apron at him, instead of the now-familiar name of Israel Lipski. He told Mrs. Leibowitz to start locking the door of the house at nightfall, and to tell their neighbors to do the same. She simply nodded, pale faced in a way that made him wonder if her husband or son had been receiving similar treatment while walking through Whitechapel.  
  
           “Erik—.” Charles said within minutes of Erik arriving the following afternoon.  
  
           “I don’t want to hear it, Xavier,” he said. “Your progress of history does me perilously little good now.”  
  
           Charles said nothing, and Erik didn’t go to his office to play chess that evening.  
  
           The next morning proved MacTaggert prophetic: more blood was to be spilled in Whitechapel. In the early hours of Saturday, September the 8 th, news came to the Institute that another woman had been found murdered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, big thanks to everyone who's left feedback or kudos. Ya'll are amazing, and I've really enjoyed chatting with you in the comments. It seriously brightens up my whole day when I get an alert from AO3.
> 
> This chapter has not been beta read, because my lovely reader has much on her plate this week. It might be betaed retroactively, but if you spot a typo and wish to leave a comment about it, please feel free to do so. I promise I don't bite, and I'm always extremely grateful when someone points my errors out. I proofread a few times before posting, but I always seem to miss some of the little things. Sorry about that!
> 
> Next week's update may (or may not) be slightly delayed. My computer crashed midweek and had to be rushed to the computer doctor. It's fixed and nothing has been lost, but not having something to write on for three days slowed me up a bit.
> 
> Emma Elizabeth Smith was a prostitute who was murdered in Whitechapel in April of 1888. The Metropolitan Police kept a file of "Whitechapel Murders" that included Smith, the five "canonical" victims that are now attributed to Jack the Ripper, and Martha Tabram, who isn't generally considered one of the canonical victims, but for whom there's evidence of _possibly_ her having been an early Ripper victim. Several others are mentioned in the file, something like a dozen women all told. Smith was the first of these Whitechapel murders, and at the time some people seem to have thought that she was a Ripper victim, but this is generally considered unlikely by modern Ripper scholars. More likely she was a victim of one of the local gangs, which is born out by the fact that Smith, who survived the initial assault and died several days later, said that she was attacked by two or three men.
> 
> Longest. Author's note. Ever.


End file.
